The funny thing is that FLOPS means floating point operations (per second) and SHA256 computations (the core Bitcoin hashing algorithm) take exactly 0 (zero) floating point ops as they consist of integer and bitwise ops only. Besides floating point operations are usually slower than integer and logical ones.
Bottom line is - measuring Bitcoin performance in FLOPS is wrong!
Bottom line is - measuring Bitcoin performance in FLOPS is wrong!
Sure, measuring bitcoin performance hashing performance in flops is wrong, but what we want to know is what the flops of the computers in the bitcoin network would be if they were doing something that required floating point operations? Maybe there's just no way to know, but that's the question, I think.
Well, I think you've got that backwards. The question is, in terms of "strength" of the network it is more important to know what the hash power of the competition could likely be, rather knowing the flop power of our network .... i.e. they are not going to attack us with flops but hashes.
So the flops-equivalent of BTC network number should properly be converted into a hash-equivalent of a possible attacker ... but I think people are mostly too lazy to bother doing that so just do it backwards and think forwards, if you know what I mean.
Oh, I think you're right that the more useful question is the question of how much hashing power other computer systems have. But, some people just want to know how many flops the bitcoin network has for this reason:
