Why Can’t One Use Supercomputers To Mine Bitcoins?

Bitcoin mining is something that keeps the top cryptocurrency of the market up and running. Today, even in the face of declining mining rewards, pro miners have held on. Nowadays, most people, in order to maximize efforts and pool mining capacity together, join mining pools instead of going solo. Given that it is possible to increase profitability by pooling together a lot of mining capacity, you might wonder: can we use supercomputers to mine Bitcoins fast and easy? Well, no, but in that case you are probably thinking: why can’t supercomputers be used to mine Bitcoins?

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The following are the key reasons why you can’t use supercomputers to mine Bitcoins:

Supercomputers Lack GPU Power

For mining Bitcoins, you need a graphics processing unit (GPU) alongside the usual CPU (central processing unit) power.

Supercomputers may have a lot of CPU power but without GPUs specifically geared towards Bitcoin mining, they do not have much use in terms of mining the top cryptocurrency in the market.

Just to put the whole thing into perspective, we can tell you that Bitcoin’s hashrate needs a processing power of around 80704290.84 petaFLOPS, while Sunway Taihulight, one of the fastest supercomputers in the whole world, manages a mere 93.01 petaFLOPS in terms of processing power.

Supercomputers Cannot Process Hashes As Quickly as ASICs

For Bitcoin mining, ASICs or application specific integrated chips are a must. These chips are built specifically for solving cryptographic problems and mine cryptocurrencies and work far far more efficiently in this realm than general-purpose supercomputers.

The supercomputers may still be quite fast, but will likely never catch up with speed of ASICs in processing hashes.

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Supercomputers Will Burn More Electricity Than It Is Worth

For an endeavour like Bitcoin mining, profitability must be your key concern so that you can make good on all that you spend on resources to mine the Bitcoins.

When you use supercomputers to mine Bitcoins, you simply end up burning much more electricity than it is even worth, considering the amount of Bitcoins you end up mining.

If you decide to use a supercomputer, you will have to use a great deal of electricity to run the processors and all the cooling components. All in all, the Sunway Taihulight spends over 15,000 kilowatts of power to run in full capacity.

An ASIC device can get the same work done at the fraction of that electricity cost, as it only burns about 0.098 kilowatts of electricity for every billion hashes.

Why Should You Not Mine Bitcoins With A Supercomputer?

The bottom line of this discussion is that mining Bitcoin with a supercomputer is entirely possible but also equally infeasible. It is inefficient and wasteful and we suggest you stick to the usual elements you use for mining.

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