Bitcoin Mining Can Power Neuroscience, Says Matrix Chief AI Scientist

At this year's BlockShow Asia, Yangdong Deng, chief AI scientist of Blockchain startup Matrix, explained how inserting Artificial Intelligence (AI) into the Blockchain ecosystem would make it possible to use Bitcoin mining computational power for scientific innovation. According to Deng, the current computing power being used in Bitcoin mining operations is 8.23x10²² floating point operations per second (FLOPS for short), while the total computing power in the world is 1.2x10²³ FLOPS. According to these calculations, Bitcoin mining is consuming 17 percent of total global computing power, justifying the frequent accusations that Bitcoin mining is wasteful. Matrix is seeking to reinvent mining algorithms by including AI into the equation through a Bayesian mining system that utilizes a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm (MCMC). Because these computations function similarly to traditional mining functions, they work well for Bitcoin mining.