Thus, the value of all Bitcoins issued exceeded $ 3 billion (or 100 billion rubles).



The reason for the growth in recent times was a series of positive news:

• Silkroad is closed - so the “Bitcoin is suitable only for drug trafficking” argument will be harder to use.
  
  
• Confiscated money (and the FBI already owns 174 thousand Bitcoins) can disappear from circulation, reducing the money supply.
  
  
• Chinese Internet giant Baidu has begun accepting payments in Bitcoin.
  
  
• And of course a slight hysteria raid abroad about the possibility of a default by the United States just half a month ago.
  
  
• Traditional speculation.

Of course, Bitcoin will collapse more than once, but it can not but rejoice that after each fall it rises higher and higher.

About the increase in complexity

The last half of the year is the mass input of capacity on specialized processors - Avalon, Bitfury, BFL and others. This led to a truly fantastic increase in complexity. From a technological point of view, it remains to take one step - 20-28 nm technology with a full-custom design, and there will no longer be any opportunities to increase the speed of mining.

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The graph with a logarithmic scale looks like this:



The speed of network calculation for 2013 has increased by ~ 100 times.

Is it possible now to break Bitcoin with supercomputers?

Naturally, these are very rough calculations, it is clear that supercomputers are designed for other tasks and 64-bit arithmetic, however the scale is impressive:



Bitcoin's current network performance is 3653 THash / sec, which is approximately 46396 petaflops. While someone is only talking about exaflop class supercomputers, the Bitcoin network is already doing 46 exaflops (* 10 ¹⁸ , billion billion) per second.



For comparison, the fastest supercomputer in the world has a performance of 33.8 petaflops, more than 1000 times less.

Bitcoin pricing survey

The previous Bitcoin price survey was half a year ago when the price first exceeded $ 100. I propose to repeat: