Yes, you can mine bitcoin on Game Boy — here’s how

A wide variety of devices can be used for mining — not only with NodeMCU (this board, based on the popular ESP8266 module, is designed to create IoT — Internet of Things devices). True, the success of this activity is not always guaranteed. For example, this Reddit guy can make $1… in 2 years.

You can use a Game Boy and Raspberry Pi Pico for mining. A year ago, YouTuber Thomas Roth (his nickname is stacksmashing) published a video showing how to mine bitcoin with it all. The handheld had only a single-core processor clocked at 4.19 MHz and 8 Kbytes of RAM. That’s nothing small compared to today’s systems.

To get the Game Boy to connect to the Bitcoin network, Thomas improved the original Link Cable to join the two Game Boys. He connected it to a Raspberry Pi Pico handheld computer. In this clever system, the Raspberry runs the Bitcoin node, and the Game Boy runs a hashing program loaded onto a flash cartridge that’s inserted into the Game Boy like a regular game cartridge. It looks simple enough until we get to this point: it all runs on software that Tom wrote himself. He even made an animation of the Bitcoin logo.

We just have to wait a few quadrillion years

The Game Boy can calculate 0.8 hashes per second (modern mining machines process 100 terahashes per second, which means they are 120 trillion times faster). In addition, the complexity of bitcoin mining has increased by 33% in one year.

By simple calculations, it becomes clear that it will take only a few quadrillion years to mine one BTC with the Game Boy. But it also proves that an old 30-year-old Nintendo console was good enough to produce the first bitcoins.

Brainzzz!

Thomas’ project was interesting. But another YouTuber tried his tests. Ken Shirriff figured out that even less powerful than the Game Boy could be used for mining. Human brains, for example! No, this is not a zombie experiment.

With thought processes, Ken could get one block round in 16 minutes and 45 seconds using only a piece of paper and a pencil. At that rate, it took 1.49 days to mine one block of Bitcoin (it has 128 rounds). And that’s 0.67 hashes per day. And the guy made the video in 2014 when the difficulty of mining in 2014 was close to zero.

By the way, Ken even calculated his energy costs and the cost of replenishing them (in donuts, LOL). He estimated that the resting metabolic rate is 1500 kcal/day, and manual hashing yields almost 10 megajoules/hash, then the typical energy consumption for mining equipment is 1000 megajoules/joule.

“So I’m less energy efficient by a factor of 10^16, or 10 quadrillions,” Ken noted.

The author used a cheap source of food energy – donuts at $0.23 (200 kilocalories) to replenish calories. Electricity would cost $0.15/kilowatt-hour, which is 6.7 times cheaper. Ken calculates that his energy cost per hash is about 67 quadrillion times less than that of the mining equipment. And he didn’t include the cost of paper and pencils.

You can read more details here, but you need excellent math skills. Also, the bitcoin mining system on paper is part of the book The Objects That Power the Global Economy. It was published in 2017.

Experiments have shown that even the human brain or a low-powered device can mine cryptocurrency. But with what efficiency?