[Yo-Yo]

Anything the big-government/big-corporate crony-fascist complex can't control is good.

You really think that the U.S. Government couldn't build a bigger bit-mining supercomputer complex than any consortium of private programmers? Ha.

They're building one now in Utah.

[pingman]

To what avail? To reach the theoretical 51% control point, only to destroy the asset? Counter-intuitive.

[Errant]

I seriously doubt any government can match private enterprise in such a fast moving field as IT. The best public dope on the government's computing capabilities, I've found so far, is from this article by Wired: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/5/.

"These goals have considerable support in Congress. Last November a bipartisan group of 24 senators sent a letter to President Obama urging him to approve continued funding through 2013 for the Department of Energy’s exascale computing initiative (the NSA’s budget requests are classified). They cited the necessity to keep up with and surpass China and Japan. “The race is on to develop exascale computing capabilities,” the senators noted. The reason was clear: By late 2011 the Jaguar (now with a peak speed of 2.33 petaflops) ranked third behind Japan’s “K Computer,” with an impressive 10.51 petaflops, and the Chinese Tianhe-1A system, with 2.57 petaflops."

The latest data from http://bitcoinwatch.com/ gives the current processing power working just Bitcoin hashs at 185,509.82 PetaFLOPS with more processing power added daily.

Look at this chart from http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/bitcoins-computing-crisis posted on 31 Oct 2013: