Bitcoin fun and Game Boy

Mining bitcoin on the Game Boy. © Stacksmashing.

Someone figured out a way to mine bitcoin with a Nintendo Game Boy. Warning: it’s glacially slow. And it won’t make you rich. With a Link cable, a Raspberry Pi Pico and a few lines of code, StackSmashing, a security IT researcher from Germany and occasional Youtuber, was able to convert a Nintendo Game Boy into the worst imaginable bitcoin mining platform. 

Cryptocurrency mining needs an internet connection. Since the Game Boy does not have wireless connectivity, the console can’t link up to the Bitcoin network without the help of an intermediary. Enter the Raspberry Pi Pico, a Game Link cable and a logic level converter that allows the console to connect to a PC that does have network access. The Game Boy is equipped with a Sharp LR35902 8-bit processor clocked at 4.18 MHz. The chip’s performance is approximately 0.8 hashes per second. Modern ASIC miners typically process up to 100,000 billion hashes per second. So the Game Boy is only 125 trillion times slower. If the software aspect of the project is your thing, the YouTuber explains it in detail in his video below.

⇨ YouTube, “Mining Bitcoin on the Game Boy.”

⇨ The Verge, Mitchell Clark, “A modder made a way to mine bitcoin on a Game Boy (very, very slowly).”

⇨ Tom’s Hardware, Zhiye Liu, “Forget GPUs! Mine Bitcoin With Game Boy + Raspberry Pi Pico.”

2021-03-29