You Can Mine Bitcoin With GameBoy Console

The surging prices of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies makes it a hot topic and attract more investors, miners to the market. The bitcoin or say crypto is developing more or less constantly upwards and mining is still attractive to many – to the chagrin of gamers who are looking for graphics cards. But it can also be cheaper.

GPUs are particularly good at mining cryptocurrencies, and that’s particularly bad news for gamers looking for a high-quality graphics card. Because if you want to get hold of a model like the Nvidia RTX 3090, you need a lot of luck and patience, or even better, both.

Slower But Workable

But there is also another way, as a resourceful electronics hobbyist has explained: Because as the YouTuber Stacksmashing shows via TechRadar, you can also use a commercially available Game Boy from Nintendo for this. Or should we say better: almost commercially available Game Boy. Because of course the handheld console introduced in 1989 has no WLAN and stacksmashing had to take a detour here. More precisely, he built an adapter for the link port of the Game Boy with the help of a Raspberry Pi Pico, with which the portable console could be connected to a Bitcoin node.

Read more: Buy Tesla Cars With Bitcoins: Tesla Issues Warning

After a little work on the hardware, the firmware also had to be modified and the link cable protocol programmed. The mining code is extremely simple, so it should not be a problem for the more than 30-year-old handheld console.

Only quadrillion years for a bitcoin

The hash speed comes close to that of modern computing units. Because the Game Boy creates 0.8 hashes per second. Modern hardware such as the ASIC miner creates around 100 terahashes per second. So that’s a factor of around 125 trillion. Stack smashing goes on to explain in his video that at this speed or rate it would “only” take a few quadrillion years to mine a Bitcoin unit.

The Video Explains It All Here