Over the last few decades, the cryptocurrency industry has been afraid of the day when computers will have the capability of cracking blockchains, and taking down networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, this day may be closer than they think, but even at the current speeds of supercomputers, only quantum computers could possess the capability. 

Scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have announced that their latest supercomputer, El Capitan, can complete 2.79 quadrillion calculations in one second, making it the fastest supercomputer in the world. This is a magnitude of 2.79 followed by 15 zeroes for you to grasp its magnitude. To put El Capitan's performance into perspective, more than a million iPhones or iPads would need to be working at the same time on one calculation to equal what El Capitan is capable of in a second, according to Jeremy Thomas of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 

"That stack of phones is over five miles high. That is an enormous amount of phones." There was a big announcement made on Monday during the annual SC Conference in Atlanta, Georgia, a conference that focuses on high-performance computing and focuses on the very latest developments related to it. Among the top 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world, El Capitan has been named among the top 100 in the Top 500 Project's bi-annual list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers. 

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which is located in Livermore, California, developed El Capitan in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, AMD and the Department of Energy, among other companies. Obviously, supercomputers are geared towards running complex tasks such as simulations, artificial intelligence development, research, and development while operating at much higher speeds than an average computer, as the name implies. 

A computer such as El Capitan, for example, is capable of performing 2.7 quadrillion operations per second, which is up to 5.4 million times faster than the average home computer, which performs a few operations a second. Thomas compared the computational power of the El Capitan supercomputer to a staggering human effort, estimating that it would require the combined work of over 8 billion people operating simultaneously for eight years to achieve what El Capitan accomplishes in a single second. 

The extraordinary capabilities of El Capitan have sparked discussions about its potential implications for industries reliant on robust cryptographic systems, particularly blockchain technology. The blockchain ecosystem, which depends heavily on secure encryption methods, has raised concerns about whether such a powerful machine could undermine its foundational security principles. 

Despite these apprehensions, experts in blockchain encryption have reassured that the fears are largely unfounded. Yannik Schrade, CEO and co-founder of Arcium explained to Decrypt that overcoming the security of blockchain systems would require an overwhelming computational feat. “An attacker would need to brute-force every possible private key,” Schrade noted. 

To put it into perspective, with a private key length of 256 bits, an attacker attempting to compromise transactions would need to exhaustively test all 256-bit key combinations. This level of computation, even with the power of El Capitan, remains practically unachievable within a reasonable timeframe, reaffirming the resilience of blockchain cryptographic systems against potential threats from even the most advanced technologies. 

These insights emphasize the sophistication and continued reliability of cryptographic standards in safeguarding blockchain security, even as computational technologies advance to unprecedented levels.