Bletchley and Bitcoins

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Just watched 'The Imitation Game' on Film4, the excellent drama about Alan Turing. By coincidence I dismantled this oddity today. It's a Butterfly Labs Bitcoin miner, now obsolete, but capable of processing 60 million SHA hashes per second (you read that right). Apparently today you need about 800 million per second as Bitcoin mining becomes increasingly difficult. The Bletchley Park 'Bombe' computers did basically the same job as this thing only many orders of magnitude slower. This thing isn't a computer, but a dual ASIC, Application Specific Integrated Circuit. It had 4 fans (count 'em) to keep it cool and drew about 1Kw of power. At best you could mine a couple of hundred Bitcoins a week back in 2013 when this became available. Butterfly Labs have since been forcibly closed down by the US courts.


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