An enterprising hardware hacker has modified an original Nintendo Game Boy in order to mine bitcoin.
In a YouTube video published by Stacksmashing, the modder was able to hack an original Game Boy in order to mine Bitcoin.
The modder’s primary challenge was getting the Game Boy, released two full decades before the creation of Bitcoin, to the internet in order to access mining. To circumvent this setback, the project used a Raspberry Pi Pico and Link Cable to connect the thirty-year-old device to a USB port on a computer.
The Game Boy was able to generate 0.8 hashes per second from a hashing program embedded on a programmable cartridge, generating a mining animation during the process.
In the video, the creative Bitcoin miner explains how fast his highly unorthodox mining rig is compared to modern ASIC-based mining hardware from companies like Bitmain:
“The hash rate is pretty impressive, roughly 0.8 hashes per second… If you compare that to a modern ASIC miner, which comes in at around 100 Terahashes per second, you can see that we are almost as fast, only off by a factor of roughly 125 trillion. At this rate, it should only take us a couple of quadrillion years to mine a Bitcoin.“
Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pixabay.com
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