The U.S. has 171 supercomputers in the TOP500 in the November 2025 edition, which is the latest published list currently available.
Monero uses RandomX, which is optimized for CPUs and memory-intensive techniques to reduce the advantage of ASICs.
The Monero network is now approximately between 5.3 and 6.4 GH/s.
Using El Capitan as an extreme reference, the #1 in the TOP500, with 11,424 batch nodes and 96 AMD EPYC cores per node, and public RandomX benchmarks for the EPYC 9654, a reasonable estimate would be around 0.9–1.0 GH/s per El Capitan-type supercomputer.
Therefore:
To surpass Monero’s current hashrate, approximately 6–8 El Capitan-type supercomputers would be needed.
But that figure is for machines at the world’s #1 level. Most of the 171 American TOP500 machines are significantly smaller, and many are designed for GPU/HPC workloads, not RandomX. So it does not mean that “just any 6–8 supercomputers” would be enough.
To surpass Monero’s current hashrate, around 40–60 American TOP500 supercomputers would be needed, starting with the most powerful ones.
But a hyperscaler like AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud has enough aggregate power to attack Monero if the provider itself decided to dedicate a large portion of its CPU fleet to the attack.
All of this fades to 0 with Bitcoin.
quotingThese days I’ve been trying to distance myself a bit from everything, and I realize that everyone forms camps and behaves like followers of political parties: they overlook their side’s mistakes and turn into hooligans.
nevent1q…puey
What’s sad is that this also happens within the anti-state and privacy space, and that’s just deceiving yourself, which is one of the worst things a man can do.
Example:
- Monero supporters always ignore the MAP Decoder attack, which statistically reduces the ring size to 4 members, although it’s true that FCMP++ will solve it. But if they were honest, they wouldn’t sell it to you as the ultimate privacy tool because it has been vulnerable to this since 2022.
- CoinJoin supporters don’t tell you about or accept the vulnerabilities of their favorite coordinator. The main example of this was Samourai, and all of its followers keep repeating the same nonsense.
- Bitcoin supporters don’t accept that achieving privacy/fungibility with Bitcoin is difficult, and Lightning supporters don’t accept Lightning’s privacy flaws.
To fight the state/system we need something that is resistant to a state-level attack — that is Bitcoin, and only Bitcoin (hash power). But we also need privacy. At the moment we don’t have that, or at least not in its fullest form. For most cases Lightning is enough; for a drug trafficker maybe it isn’t sufficient.
That said, I think it’s fine that people use other solutions like Monero — I’m not the one to deny people their choice. FCMP++ will be a huge leap forward if it works, but don’t lie to people either. Bitcoin has no alternative, though it can have complements such as Monero or other privacy strategies. But we should all start by being honest with ourselves.