Teach you how to understand Bitcoin computing power

In last week’s article, Dabai introduced “What is a 51% hashrate attack” . For cryptocurrencies that use the PoW consensus mechanism , if miners control more than 50% of the hashrate of the blockchain, they can do evil: double spending, suppress certain addresses from sending/receiving tokens, etc.

Therefore, the size and distribution of the total network computing power plays a very important role in the security of cryptocurrencies based on the PoW consensus mechanism. If the computing power is monopolized by a few giants, a 51% computing power attack can easily occur.

In information about Bitcoin computing power, we often see units such as " EH/S ", " P H /S ", and " TH/S ". What do they mean?

In the article "A classic story that will help you understand Bitcoin mining in 3 minutes" , Dabai introduced that "mining" Bitcoin is actually to perform hash operations on the 6 "dragon balls" in the block header and obtain the hash value. "H/S" represents how many hash operations the mining machine can perform in one second:

So, if we see the hashrate is “50EH/S”, it means the hashrate is 5 times 10 to the 19th power (19 zeros).

Currently, many blockchain browsers provide real-time computing power queries. According to data from the blockchain.com website, the total computing power of Bitcoin on May 4 was 48,003,251TH/S , which is about 48EH/S (18 zeros).

In April this year, Bitmain launched the latest generation of mining machines, the Antminer S17 Pro, which is said to have a computing power of up to 53TH/S in standard mode. If Dabai wants to launch a 51% computing power attack on Bitcoin by purchasing Antminer S17 Pro, Dabai needs to purchase at least 905,722 mining machines to reach the current computing power of the entire Bitcoin network.

After looking at the above data, do you think it is worthwhile to purchase mining machines to launch a 51% hashrate attack? Why? Feel free to tell Dabai in the comment section.