A Mosquito's Voice in a Stadium

An open metal case: a board with rows of identical chips mounted on a heatsink, fans and bundles of wires to the side. — Avalon, one of the first ASIC machines. It can do nothing except guess numbers for bitcoin. The photograph was taken by Zhang Nangeng, founder of the firm that made it. Source: 张楠赓, CC0

In his whitepaper Satoshi wrote that proof of work amounts to the principle of “one CPU, one vote.” My MacBook, which found two blocks in the summer of 2010, was such a vote, and that vote weighed roughly as much as the vote of any other participant in the network with a similar computer. Three years later the vote of an ordinary computer weighed less than the voice of a mosquito in a football stadium.

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