YouTuber Mines Bitcoin With His 32-Year-Old Game Boy
But it’s around 125 trillion times slower than a regular mining computer.
What should you do if you wanted to mine Bitcoin but didn’t have the hardware for it? You take out your 32-year-old Nintendo Game Boy, of course.
Finding it increasingly difficult to purchase mining hardware like GPUs at reasonable prices, YouTube channel Stacksmashing dug through his old collection of gadgets and took out his original Game Boy, turning the retro device into a Bitcoin mining machine. While it’s definitely doable, the process (as expected) takes a bit of work and obviously doesn’t really run as well as a modern dedicated machine.
For a start, the handheld console isn’t able to connect to the Internet, and it also doesn’t have the capacity to hold an entire blockchain, so Stacksmashing had to hook the device up to his computer with the Pico and Link Cable, running the Bitcoin node of that. The hashing program itself then runs on the Game Boy via a programmable cartridge, and while technically it does end up being able to mine the cryptocurrency, it operates at a rate of 0.8 hashes per second. That’s roughly 125 trillion times slower than some of the higher-end machines currently available, which are capable of 100 terahashes per second.
Check out Stacksmashing’s video above, and those lucky few who still have Game Boys at home can definitely give this a try.
Elsewhere in blockchain-related news, Legendary Entertainment is dropping two Godzilla vs. Kong NFT collections.
