The device that the YouTuber proposes certainly holds the record as the world’s slowest cryptocurrency miner. Most choose to use faster and more powerful solutions to mine Bitcoin while others seek alternatives.
A 30-year-old Nintendo portable video game console serves as the basis for building a new cryptocurrency-mining device. A YouTuber, identified as Stacksmashing, managed to use an old Game Boy console to mine Bitcoin. He used a little help to be able to reuse an artifact that many have probably discarded.
Game Boy consoles, which emerged before the Internet became widespread, cannot connect to the network. They are not even capable of storing the entire chain of Bitcoin blocks.
Solving the Weaknesses of a Game Boy Console
To solve that situation, Stacksmashing couples the device to a computer running a node. To achieve this, he uses a Game Link port on the video game console to enable the multi-player mode. In the past, players were able to trade Pokemon this way.
To allow the Game Boy console to receive instructions through the computer, the YouTuber linked it to a RaspBerry Pi Pico micro PC. He uses it as an intermediate station to facilitate the reading of network protocols.
After that, Stacksmashing programmed the read-only memory (ROM) of the Game Boy console. Its development kit is open source to implement software to mine Bitcoin on GPUs. In this way, the YouTuber started the device, reaching just 0.8 H/s.
The Time that a Game Boy Console Would Take to Mine 1 BTC
A WhatsMiner M30S can reach 112 TH/s, that is, its performance is 140 billion times higher than a Game Boy console.
There is currently increasingly fierce competition in the cryptocurrency mining industry. For that reason, the possibility of mining with a Game Boy console is really negligible. “At this rate, it would take us 2 billion years to extract a complete Bitcoin,” acknowledges the YouTuber.
In any case, the Stacksmashing project is not profitable enough for the mining of Bitcoin. However, it is certainly among the top slowest cryptocurrency miners of all time, according to a Twitter user. Another person suggested creating a mining pool with a million Game Boy consoles to increase computing power.
Some others even claim that it is possible to mine Bitcoin with a cow’s methane. Last year, the owner of Upstream Data, a company that offers mobile data centers to mine Bitcoin, answered a funny question. He told bitcoiner Jameson Lopp that it would take 255,000 cows’ methane (flatulence) to mine 1 BTC. Therefore, a cow would allow getting get just 0.00000392 BTC (392 sats) per day.
The growing relevance of Bitcoin in today’s world economy has led to the most imaginative ideas to mine it. The use of video game consoles and cow’s methane are just two of the alternatives to expensive mining devices. Last year, someone even used a Tesla electric car to mine the pioneering cryptocurrency.
By Alexander Salazar
