YouTuber Turned His Nintendo Game Boy Into A BTC Mining Rig

A very skilled YouTuber turned his Nintendo Game Boy that was released more than 30 years ago, into a bitcoin mining rig as we can see more in our latest bitcoin news today.

The pseudonymous YouTuber turned his Nintendo console into a bitcoin mining rig after Elon Musk tweeted that you can purchase a Tesla with Bitcoin. However, he was not able to find any graphic cards in online stores which made is why he got so creative:

 “But then I realized: I have a lot of very high-end gaming hardware just lying around, why not use that for mining Bitcoin?”

And so he chooses to use a Game Boy that initially was supposed to serve as a 4.19  megahertz CPU that is accompanied by 8 kilobytes of video memory but the console was incapable to connect to other devices or nods which became a huge obstacle that the Youtuber wasn’t able to surpass at first:

 “We also need it to announce our block in case we manage to mine one, but the Game Boy doesn’t have Wi-Fi or anything, so how can we get it to communicate with the Bitcoin node?.”

To bypass this limitation, the YouTuber used a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller chip to build an improvised USB Adapter and connect the console to the computer as he explained:

 “Luckily the Game Boy has a link port, which is normally used to perform Pokémon trading and other highly important things, but for mining, we can use it to communicate with a computer.”

At last, he downloaded a full BTC node on his PC and created custom mining firmware for the Game Boy as well as a modified mining program to outsource the console calculations instead of using a computer. The resulting contraption started mining BTC but of course, slower than what most systems are capable of:

 “The hash rate is pretty impressive—roughy 0.8 hashes per second! If you compare that to a modern ASIC miner, which comes in at around 100 terahashes per second, you can see that we are almost as fast—only off by a factor of roughly 125 trillion.”

At this rate, it will take a few quadrillion years for the Gameboy to discover a new BTC Block but it is powered by four AAA batteries which makes it energy efficient.