'“Obviously, mining Bitcoin on a Game Boy is everything but profitable,' Stacksmashing says.
A YouTuber has turned a 1989 Game Boy console into a Bitcoin miner.
The reconfigured Nintendo device can handle 0.8 hashes a second… meaning that it’s just 125 trillion times slower than modern ASIC miners.
This means that, all going well, the Game Boy should be able to mine a Bitcoin in a “couple of quadrillion years.”
Given how the last Bitcoin is expected to enter into circulation in 2140, this might be a little too late for the console to make any impact.
A Lot of Technical Knowhow
Stacksmashing’s experiment took a lot of engineering — and it involved using a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller board, along with a USB flash card.
The end result is esthetically pleasing and unapologetically retro — with the Bitcoin logo gradually making its way from one end of the screen to another as the nonce increases.
One issue that stacksmashing was unable to get around concerned the Game Boy’s power supply. Given how the beloved handheld runs off four AA batteries, keeping the newfound mining machine going could be a very expensive enterprise… and an impractical one at that.
The YouTube set up a new, empty Bitcoin blockchain with a low level of difficulty — and verified that the device can successfully mine blocks. He added:
“Obviously, mining Bitcoin on a Game Boy is everything but profitable. But I learned a lot of things while building this, and definitely had a ton of fun.”
