To get the ability to mine Bitcoin, you don't need gaming hardware. However, the price of a PC graphics card for such processing is still too high. Sure, people hoping to get into cryptocurrency mining could buy a dedicated ASIC rig to mine a digital currency. However, there is a much cheaper, if much less efficient, way to mine, and it's in your old Game Boy.
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It may sound unlikely, but someone actually found a way to mine Bitcoin using a Nintendo Game Boy.
Using a Game Boy connection cable, a Raspberry Pi Pico, and custom code, computer security researcher and YouTuber Stacksmashingwas able to turn a Nintendo Game Boy into the world's worst Bitcoin miner.
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Stacksmashing's miner can run 0.8 hashes per second. In contrast, dedicated mining hardware operates about 125 billion times faster. According to its creator's calculations, at the Game Boy's pace, it will have its first Bitcoin in just four billion years! On the other hand, the miner he created only costs four AA batteries.
So it may not be useful for actual Bitcoin mining at all, but the fact that it works is pretty impressive. Stacksmashing says he created a blank blockchain, with less difficulty testing it, and the system managed to hash a full block.
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Even so, using the handheld game console to mine the blockchain was actually the easy part. The hard part was connecting it to the internet.
You can watch full video on YouTube, where he describes how he used his Raspberry Pi and Game Boy connection cable to connect his old Nintendo to the internet and many other details.
