Bitcoin facts

Bitcoin Studies

You suddenly wish you could go back to university, but you only have bitcoins left because of your forward-thinking state of mind? Do not panic: you are now able to pay your tuition fees with Bitcoins for the famous New-Yorker university of The King’s College!

Bitcoin Boulevard

Are you visiting the Netherlands? Do not miss the Bitcoin Boulevard located in the Hague, which offers a unique feature: A high majority of shopkeepers who are located on the two streets that go alongside the channel – Bierkade and Groenewegje - now accept Bitcoin, following an initiative submitted by Hendrik Jan Hilbolling and Peter Klasen.

The first transaction

Bitcoin has enabled 43 472 379 transactions since its creation through its network. However, you will be certainly interested by knowing who initiated the first transaction.

It is no one else but Satoshi Nakamoto, the fantastic Bitcoin and underlying technology creator, who sent 100 bitcoins to Hal Finney on January 12th, 2009. The computing power of the Bitcoin network is 7468 times higher than the one of the cumulative 500 world supercomputers Indeed, the computing power of the whole Bitcoin network is estimated to 2 046 364 Pflop/s, against 274 Pflop/s for the cumulative 500 most powerful world supercomputers.

First of all, it is important to note that Bitcoin miners are not performing any floating point operations (FLOP) but only integer calculus. How have we then been able to proceed? It’s very easy, in fact:

1 hash = 6.35K integer operations

1 integer operation = 2 floating point operations

1 hash = 12.7K floating point operations

Then, using this rate of one hash = 12,7K flop, and by analyzing the current hashrate of the Bitcoin network which peaks to 161 131 086 gh/s on July 31st 2014, we get an estimation of 10^9*161131086 H/s * 12700 = 2 046 364,7922 Petaflops.

So much computing power that could have been possibly used in modelization purposes, for medicine, astronomy, physics. Damn bitcoiners!