YouTuber turns Nintendo Recreation Boy into Bitcoin mining rig

Pseudonymous YouTube content material creator referred to as “stacksmashing” has managed to show his Nintendo Recreation Boy, a handheld sport console launched over 30 years in the past, right into a Bitcoin (BTC) mining machine, as demonstrated in a video printed yesterday.

In accordance with stacksmashing, after Elon Musk introduced that Tesla has begun accepting BTC funds, it turned clear that it’s time to “get into the Bitcoin mining sport.” Nevertheless, the YouTuber couldn’t discover any first rate graphics playing cards in on-line shops, prompting him to get inventive.

“However then I spotted: I’ve lots of very high-end gaming {hardware} simply mendacity round, why not use that for mining Bitcoin?” he famous.

And so a Recreation Boy turned his {hardware} of alternative. For reference, the unique, unmodded console that he used has a 4.19 megahertz CPU, accompanied by 8 kilobytes of video reminiscence.

Nevertheless, the console’s incapability to connect with different units—Bitcoin nodes on this case— turned the primary impediment that stood in the best way of stacksmashing’s mining aspirations.

“We additionally want it to announce our block in case we handle to mine one, however the Recreation Boy doesn’t have Wi-Fi or something, so how can we get it to speak with the Bitcoin node?” he requested.

To bypass this limitation, stacksmashing used a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller chip to construct an improvised USB adapter and join the console to his pc.

“Fortunately the Recreation Boy has a hyperlink port, which is generally used to carry out Pokémon buying and selling and different extremely essential issues, however for mining, we will use it to speak with a pc,” he famous.

Lastly, he downloaded a full Bitcoin node on his PC, created customized mining firmware for his Recreation Boy, and modified a mining program, referred to as ntgbtminer, to “outsource” the calculations to the console as an alternative of a pc. And the ensuing contraption truly started mining Bitcoin, albeit “barely” slower than trendy methods are able to.

“The hash charge is fairly spectacular—roughy 0.8 hashes per second! When you examine that to a contemporary ASIC miner, which is available in at round 100 terahashes per second, you’ll be able to see that we’re virtually as quick—solely off by an element of roughly 125 trillion,” the YouTuber boasted.

At this charge, it could take solely “a few quadrillion years” for his Recreation Boy to find a brand new Bitcoin block. On the plus facet, it’s powered by simply 4 AAA batteries—not like electricity-hungry specialised mining machines of at this time.

“Large success!” stacksmashing concluded.

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