Stacksmashing – a YouTube content creator who focuses on reverse engineering gadgets and old-school games just for kicks – recently made waves with his video in which he sets up a Game Boy to mine Bitcoin, with a little help from a Raspberry Pi Pico and a connection to a computer running a Bitcoin node.
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In an era where gamers and crypto miners are engaging in asymmetrical warfare over high-end GPUs and exploring the tactical advantages of eBay botting versus grey market rigs from Newegg, one entertainer set out to see if he can use other gaming equipment for the task as well.
The experiment was a success, with Stacksmashing successfully setting up a Bitcoin mining rig running on four AA batteries, childhood memories and sheer ingenuity.
Of course, certain technical hurdles had to be overcome first – for starters, Game Boys cannot connect to the Internet. The memory available on a Game Boy is also too small to contain the entire blockchain – so the Game Boy was jimmy-rigged with a Raspberry Pi Pico for some processing power, which was then linked to a PC with internet access running a Bitcoin mining node.
However, before you go rummaging through that one box in your garage to duplicate the experiment, note that the mining rate of the entire setup only amounts to 0.8 hashes per second. For comparison, a dedicated mining rig has an average speed of about 125 billion times that, meaning that if things were left to run their course – assuming the mining difficulty of Bitcoin left unchanged – Stacksmashing’s Game Boy would earn 1 BTC within a few quadrillion years.
In order to test his setup, Stacksmashing had to set up a new Bitcoin blockchain that contained no prior records. However, it’s quite exciting to see that the thing actually works – and beeps along to some cutesy animations while at it.
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