The reward to nodes for verifying transactions has proven to be a profitable use of processing power. In January 2017, the processing power behind the Bitcoin network is equivalent to that of 2 trillion consumer laptops. It is more than two million times larger than the processing power of the world's largest supercomputer, and more than 200,000 times larger than the world's top 500 supercomputers combined. By monetizing processing power directly, Bitcoin has become the largest single‐purpose computer network in the world.
