The computing power
To give you an idea about the computer processing power mentioned here—it is defined as a hash rate or number of hash function calculations per unit of time. The most powerful Bitcoin mining chips currently can perform at a rate of 14 tera hash per second. This is 14 trillion hash function calculations per second! And a trillion is 1 with 12 zeros after it. A pretty large number, isn't it? You should also consider that these chips are designed specifically to optimize the calculation of this particular hash function and they cannot do anything else. They are called ASICs, which stands for application-specific integrated circuits.
Let's have a look at how difficulty has increased in line with the hash rate over time. The ...
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