Quote from: orthzar on May 27, 2011, 03:28:09 PM

I heard somewhere (Agorist Radio podcast, I think) that the total Bitcoin network power has surpassed the total power of the top 50(?) super computers in the world. That was an amazing figure to hear.

It doesn't strike me as very amazing that thousands or millions of computers (most of which are very specialized GPU integer processors) surpass 50 super computers that contain an equal amount of ram,disk,storage,and interconnects as they do raw floating point generalized computing, you are comparing apples to polka dotted spacecraft, not even in the same realm.

Quote from: SoreGums on May 27, 2011, 03:37:41 PM

plus if they are all windows machines (highly likely) then the process is easily hidden, especially if task scheduled to run on idle.

If they are universities, they will know for sure, they have very strict budgets and a spike in power costs will definitely be noticed. As for finance areas they will be fired for sure and it will tarnish their career, there is no way in hell they are going to trust them after such an abuse of resources, I know I wouldn't. They have no clue what is in the bitcoin programs and utilities, they could contain anything, I know they probably don't but that isn't the point.