You might have noticed Elon Musk recently bought $1.5 billion of Bitcoin using Tesla cash reserves and he’s expecting Tesla will start taking payment for cars in Bitcoin. In February 2021, the (still volatile) exchange rate went above $50,000 per Bitcoin as Governments continue printing fiat money to stimulate their economies.
A fascinating aspect of Bitcoin is the exponentially increasing processing (and testing) rate. This is the time it takes the Bitcoin network to generate and test blocks for transaction validation by peer-to-peer consensus before they are added to the blockchain. A new record rate of 165,861,000,000,000,000,000 (166 quintillion) hashes and tests per second was achieved on 9th February.
The Bitcoin community has harnessed a mysteriously advanced delivery philosophy and created a new concept called ASIC Clouds. An ASIC is an Application Specific Integrated Circuit. Each ASIC contains multiple high-efficiency Replicated Compute Accelerators, or RCAs. An ASIC Cloud contains multiple ASICs per server, multiple servers per rack, and multiple racks per datacenter. This has been achieved without any funding from Governments, Universities, or Corporations, in a fraction of the time it takes Intel to design a new chip.
Now created, ASIC Clouds can be used for ‘planet scale’ workloads such as YouTube-style video transcoding and Deep Learning from vast networks, where both energy efficiency and hyper-performance are increasingly important.
If you are interested in Cryptocurrency, Blockchain, or Planet-scale computing, this paper ‘The Risk and Test in Bitcoin‘ remains a useful guide and has been published as a eBook for the testing community
Key Takeaways from this eBook:
- A readable explanation of Bitcoin, the original and most successful Blockchain.
- A guide for Testers to think more deeply about risk assessment.
- A chance to win $1 million by solving a problem.
Once you’ve read this paper by Declan, why not check out all the software testing webinars and eBooks here on EuroSTARHuddle.com?
