An unlikely use for a Game Boy was recently discovered, refashioning the handheld device into a Bitcoin mining system. In the last year, cryptocurrency continued an already meteoric rise, with a single Bitcoin currently standing at around 57 thousand US dollars. With that, traders have dedicated serious processing power to mining. YouTuber stacksmashing decided to go a different route and put some vintage hardware, in the form of a Game Boy, to the test.
Due to the shortage of available GPUs, stacksmashing had to figure a way to convert their Game Boy into a Bitcoin mining operation. In order to do so, they employed the use of a standard USB flashcard—to run the ROMs on the Game Boy—as well as a modified link cable combined with a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller board to ferry information between the Game Boy and the host computer.
Just earlier this month, rumors that the PlayStation 5 could mine Ethereum surfaced but were quickly dismissed. Now, through this incredible feat of ingenuity, stacksmashing's Game Boy began to mine Bitcoin. For fans that are unfamiliar with cryptocurrency, Bitcoin is a finite resource that is "mined" through solving algorithmic puzzles. The algorithms are essentially long strings of numbers that, if their value is less than or equal to a target number, produce a Bitcoin. Because a miner needs to check an astronomical amount of numbers against the target, a colossal amount of processing power is normally employed.
Unfortunately, as expected, mining Bitcoin on a Game Boy is slow. In fact, that's putting it lightly, it's unfathomably slow. During tests, stacksmashing estimated that the Game Boy, when compared to modern mining operations, is only about 125 trillion times less effective, meaning a potential Bitcoin fortune made by using the Game Boy may be out of reach. An advantage, the YouTuber jokingly points out is that the Asics mining operations use a ton of power whereas the Game Boy uses only 4 AA batteries.
To further cement the experiment, stacksmashing set up a blockchain with an extremely low difficulty to see if the Game Boy could theoretically mine a Bitcoin. It did. While mining on a Game Boy is hardly feasible or worthwhile, the mere fact that a Game Boy could be refashioned in such a way makes this effort a success. However, would-be Bitcoin miners should probably look elsewhere and instead employ their Game Boy for its intended purpose of running a bunch of time-tested games.