The last bitcoin

Author: Liu Jiaolian

BTC still hovered below 100k over the weekend. The past week was a week when 100,000 dollars became a reality. 《12.8 Jiaolian Insider: Week 49, Haodabing broke six figures for the first time, and the new director of the White House has a grand plan》 reviewed this.

One ​​BTC of 100,000 dollars does make ordinary retail investors feel that it is not cheap. However, do you know that according to the halving algorithm stipulated in the Bitcoin system code, the last Bitcoin of the total upper limit of 21 million BTC will take about 35 years to be mined before the issuance of additional BTC is completely stopped in 2140.

The above picture is the timetable for BTC production halving. After each reduction in production, 210,000 blocks will be mined, which takes about 4 years. A simple calculation shows that from the reduction in production in 2104 until the complete cessation of production in 2140, the total number of BTC that can be produced is:

(298+149+74+37+18+9+4+2+1) * 210000 / 10^8 = 1.2432

Now, the global BTC network has a computing power of up to about 800EHash/s. 800EHash/s means that 800 x 10^18 hash numbers can be calculated in one second, that is, 800,000,000,000,000,000,000 hash numbers.

According to investigation, the world's number one supercomputer is the El Capitan in the United States, which has a performance of more than 1.7 EFlops (1.7 × 10^18 floating-point operations per second).

According to the 53rd chapter of Chapter 11 of the Teaching Chain's "History of Bitcoin", "The unit of computing power of a supercomputer is FLOP/s. According to the rough estimate of the actual measured data of CPU computing power by Satoshi Nakamoto and netizens, the floating point computing power of a general-purpose computer needs to be reduced to about one ten-thousandth of the original value when converted into hash computing power. In other words, every 10,000 floating point computing power (10,000 FLOP/s) is approximately equivalent to 1 hash computing power (1 hash/s). "

That is to say, the computing power of the world's first supercomputer is approximately equivalent to 1.7 x 10^14 Hash/s.

800EHash/s is roughly equivalent to 5 million such supercomputers.

When I wrote The History of Bitcoin in 2020, the world's fastest supercomputer was still Japan's Fugaku (about 442 PFlops/s), and the computing power of the BTC network was only 100EH/s, which is equivalent to the computing power of 3 million supercomputers. Four years later, the performance of supercomputers has increased by 3.8 times, and the computing power of the BTC network has increased by 8 times.

Supercomputer technology is improving. But BTC computing power technology is improving faster.

This only examines the dimension of computing power, not the dimension of energy consumption.

When writing The History of Bitcoin in 2020, Jiaolian estimated the energy consumption and wrote: "If 3 million supercomputers are really used, not to mention whether there is enough money to produce and manufacture them, just in terms of power consumption, it will consume 30,000 times the electricity consumed by Bitcoin mining today, which is not feasible."

In the past four years, the development of BTC computing power has further widened the gap with supercomputers. The energy consumption gap is estimated to have widened further, right?

Therefore, we say that the security of BTC does not stay at the abstract and logical level, but is implemented at the material and energy level that humans cannot transcend!

Nothing else can, at a lower cost, overwhelm the computing power used by the BTC network to protect the security of all BTC. This sentence is already an objective fact that has been set in stone.

BTC may not be the asset with the largest market value among all forms of human wealth, but it is already the safest asset.

Now let's look back and think about the question at the beginning of this article, that is, with the huge computing power of the BTC network and even greater computing power in the future, it took 35 years just to create the last BTC.

How much is such a BTC worth?

And even a BTC that is exactly the same as this one can be easily owned for less than 100,000 US dollars today.

Is it worth it or not?