A programmer managed to turn a laptop from 1989 into a cryptocurrency mining machine, but it won't make anyone rich.
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This 1989 laptop is the Toshiba T3200SX, which is powered by an Intel 386SX 16 MHz processor and runs on MS-DOS. When it first hit the market, the T3200SX was available at a price of $6,299 (or $13,896 in today's money).
The creator of the mining project, Dmitrii Eliuseev, posted an entry describing his process, which included programming his own mining software for MS-DOS (now available on GitHub) and calculating the potential earnings over time.
The conversion of hardware into Bitcoin mining machines has become something of a tradition in recent years. Smartphones, Raspberry Pis and even Teslas have been used for cryptocurrency mining. Thanks to Eliuseev, the Toshiba T3200SX now joins this famous list.
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However, while the T3200SX is indeed capable of mining Bitcoin, it achieves a throughput of just 15 hashes per second, which Eliuseev estimates would yield one dollar worth of Bitcoin every 584 million years.
In terms of data, the most efficient ASIC miners on the market today produce 110 terahashes/second, 100 trillion times more than the T3200SX. And Bitcoin mining farms are filled with many hundreds of these ASICs.
As noted by the Tom’s Hardware website, there is also other bad news for anyone hoping to profit using the T3200SX. Under load, the laptop consumes about 39 W of power, which would cost the owner about $3.30 per month.
See also: Cryptocurrency: Should Bitcoin mining be restricted in Europe?
Unfortunately, Bitcoin mining on the T3200SX will do the opposite of getting rich: for every $1 you earn, you will lose $23.1 billion to the utilities company.
Information source: techradar.com
