The horsepower required to succeed in Bitcoin is highlighted by the iDrive simulation, which used 600 servers. This has led to the emergence of a new class of hardware vendors selling custom hardware for bitcoin mining. Most serious Bitcoin miners have graduated from CPUs and GPUs to specialized chips such as FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) or ASICs that can be optimized for specific workloads. Practitioners of Bitcoin mining – the term for using data-crunching computers to earn newly-issued virtually currency – are adopting more powerful hardware, pooling their efforts and seeking to slash their power bills. The cryptocurrency is now supported by a powerful global network backed by 150,000 petaflops per second of computing power, roughly 600 times the combined power of the all the supercomputers in the Top500 list. Over the past year, the computing power supporting the bitcoin network has soared. Participants in this online ledger are rewarded with new bitcoins, which are issued about every 10 minutes. At its heart is a huge distributed computing network that verifies each transaction.
BITCOIN CORE MINING SOFTWARE
The iDrive test-drive reinforced a common theme on Bitcoin mining forums: To earn money by mining, you need to invest in highly-customized computers using ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) to crunch data for creating and tracking bitcoins.īitcoin is sometime referred to as the “Internet of money,” a platform using cryptography and software to offer an alternative currency and payment-tracking system. You need custom machines to effectively mine bitcoins and generate a real ROI." "Its a waste of time, so any other company thinking about mining with their infrastructure, learn from us," said iDrive's Matthew Harvey. The result: running Bitcoin mining software on those 600 quad-core servers for a year would earn about 0.43 Bitcoin, worth a total return of about $275.08 at current prices on major Bitcoin exchanges. So the company ran a test with 600 servers to see whether Bitcoin mining could become a secondary revenue stream. (Image: iDrive)Ĭan data centers tap unused server capacity to mine for Bitcoins? The question occurred to the team at the online backup service iDrive, which performs most of its customer backup jobs overnight, leaving its 3,000 quad-core servers idle for much of the day.
Online backup provider iDrive (mascot shown above) conducted an experiment in which it used 600 quad-core servers to mine for Bitcoin.