Can You Mine Bitcoin With A Game Boy? This Guy Gave It A Go

It may be common knowledge that mining Bitcoin (BTC) requires a great deal of energy and computer power but it did not deter a person online from trying to do it on an 80’s era  Nintendo Co, Ltd NTDOY GameBoy console running on two AA batteries. 

What Happened: Stacksmashing, an Information Technology researcher and content creator on Alphabet Inc’s GOOGL GOOG YouTube, bundled his Game Boy with a Raspberry Pi Pico and a Game Boy Link cable to turn it into a nifty little Bitcoin miner.

The device, first released in April 1989, communicated with Stacksmashing’s computer running the mining software through the setup. 

The researcher managed to get what he called an “impressive” 0.8 hashes per second using the kit. 

“If you compare that to a modern ASIC [application-specific integrated circuit] miner, which comes in at around 100 tera hashes per second, you can see that we are almost as fast, only off by a factor of roughly 125 trillion,” said Stacksmashing in the video.

 “At this rate, it should only take us a couple of quadrillion years to mine a bitcoin.”

See also: How to Buy Bitcoin (BTC)

Why It Matters: Stacksmashing made a reference to Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk's announcement regarding accepting Bitcoin as a motivating factor mining the cryptocurrency on his Game Boy.

Interestingly, the YouTuber also jokingly noted the ongoing graphics processing unit shortage in the video.

Nvidia Corporation NVDA has tried to discourage the use of its GPUs for cryptocurrency mining.

The rival Advanced Micro Devices, Inc AMD on the other hand has not put any restrictions on mining using its GPUs. 

See Also: Ethereum, Dogecoin And Other Cryptocurrencies You Can 'Create' Using Your Laptop

While BTC presently requires powerful ASIC miners, Ethereum (ETH) can be mined with sufficiently powerful GPUs, which led to a Chinese software developer’s joke claim that he mined ETH using Sony Corporation’s SNE latest PlayStation 5 console.

BTC traded 1.31% lower at $55,446.02 at press time, while ETH traded 1.44% lower at $1,690.26.

Price Action: Nintendo shares closed 2.78% higher at $73.12 on Friday.