How long does it take to mine a Bitcoin on Game Boy? A million times faster than pencil and paper by DailyCoin

More than 90% of possible circulation has already been extracted. This makes Bitcoin mining difficulty extremely high. Today, the average cost to mine a Bitcoin is $12,000. The public miners use stacks of expensive Nvidia (NASDAQ: ) RTX 3090 GPUs. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t mine Bitcoin on less powerful devices, like a Game Boy.

It just takes longer.

How long does it take to mine one Bitcoin on Game Boy?

A year ago, YouTuber Thomas ‘stackmashing’ Roth published a video where he made the original Game Boy mine for Bitcoin. The console only had a single-core 4.19 MHz processor and 8 Kbytes of RAM on board. In comparison, some modern GPUs have 1.7 GHz clock speeds and 16-24 GB of memory.

To get the Game Boy to connect to the Bitcoin network, he modified the original Link cable, which allowed it to connect two Game Boys and share Pokémons, and connected it to the Raspberry Pi Pico pocket computer. In this “rig”, the Raspberry part runs a Bitcoin node, while the Game Boy runs a hashing program loaded onto a flash cartridge, which is inserted into the Game Boy like a regular game cartridge. Of course, the software is written by Tom himself. He even added a little animation of the Bitcoin logo sliding from left to right.

So what is the mining speed of such a “rig”?

According to Tom, a Game Boy is capable of calculating 0.8 hashes per second. By comparison, a modern miner works at 100 terahashes per second, which is 120 trillion times faster. Also, Bitcoin mining difficulty has increased by 33% since then.

This means it will take a few quadrillion years to mine a Bitcoin on Game Boy!

However, it is worth mentioning that the Game Boy is certainly capable of handling mining a Bitcoin on a custom empty Bitcoin network. This means that Nintendo’s console was suitable for mining the very first Bitcoins, even though it was released 20 years before the creation of Bitcoin itself.

What is the slowest way to mine Bitcoin?

Another YouTuber, Ken Shirriff, went even further. What is an even less powerful machine compared to the Game Boy? Of course, he could use one of the first Pong home consoles, but getting them to communicate with a Bitcoin node would be difficult, since they wouldn’t connect to anything but your TV, so no magic link cables.

So he decided to use pencil and paper to calculate a hash. The first known calculator is obviously a human brain! And every computer is just an extremely advanced calculator.

It turned out that Ken’s brain was able to “mine” a block round in 16 minutes and 45 seconds. At this rate, mining one Bitcoin block, which consists of 128 rounds, will take 1.49 days, which equates to a hash rate of 0.67 hashes per day.

Now let’s check the date of the video: September 28, 2014. Should I mention that the mining difficulty was close to zero in 2014? Of course, anything is possible in this world. The only question is “why?”

The funnest part of his research was energy consumption calculations:

“…assuming a resting metabolic rate of 1500kcal/day, manual hashing works out to almost 10 megajoules/hash. A typical energy consumption for mining hardware is 1000 megahash/joule. So I’m less energy efficient by a factor of 10^16, or 10 quadrillion,” Ken said in his blog. Further cost calculations became even more ridiculous:

“A cheap source of food energy is donuts at $0.23 for 200 kcal. Electricity here is $0.15/kilowatt-hour, which is cheaper by a factor of 6.7 – closer than I expected. So my energy cost per hash is about 67 quadrillion times that of mining hardware,” he continued. Ken also didn’t include the cost of paper and pencils in his “data report”. And I guess he’ll need a lot of that. At least now we see that our current mining with rigs and GPUs are more sustainable than cutting trees, making paper and using it for Bitcoin mining calculations.

Anyway, there is a lesson from such a seemingly ridiculous experiment: sometimes people are more suited to creating things rather than monotonous work!

To summarize

In this article I wanted to show the mathematical magic behind every Bitcoin, and therefore cryptocurrency. People got too focused on price fluctuations, fraud and other things, and forgot what was under the hood.

Blockchain technology is one of the first perfectly functioning ways of storing value in the digital world. And while it’s not perfect, it’s a start to something more reliable and technically advanced.

Continue reading at DailyCoin