The adoption of digital assets is intensifying, justifying the growing interest in the mining industry. To promote the decentralization of this activity, a YouTuber has developed a mining technique allowing the use of a Gameboy. But to extract a bitcoin, it will take a few million years.
A very slow process
This is certainly the funniest information published on Reddit on 1er September 2022. A user of the platform made a publication in which we see a Gameboy console. This displayed information related to bitcoin (BTC) mining activity. Additionally, in the caption of the photo, the user wrote: “you can mine bitcoin on a Gameboy”.
The information quickly sparked many comments from community members, both on Reddit and Twitter.
You should know that this post was originally published in March 2021 by the youtuber Stacksmashing, who is the one who developed the process. Moreover, he explained everything about it in a video.
According to him, the most important thing is to be able to connect the console to the Bitcoin network. For this, the Gameboy must be connected to a PC via a miniature programmable card called Pico Raspberry Pi and a level switch. This will help manage the different levels of tension. The device will then run custom software from a flash card. The card will run the hashing algorithm on incoming data from the PC and send the results back to the PC, which will communicate to it with the Bitcoin network.
Technically, the Gameboy only manages to achieve a rate of 0.8 hashes per second, whereas today, specialized mining machines operate at a rate of 100 tera-hashes per second.
Two million trillion years for a bitcoin?
According to a calculation made by a member of the community, it will take around 2 quadrillion years to mine a bitcoin with a Gameboy. You should know that 2 quadrillion years is equivalent to two million trillion years.
Discussions also focused on the need for quality batteries and power supply systems to be put in place. Indeed, crypto mining is an activity that consumes a lot of energy.
For one of the speakers on Twitter, if it is really possible to mine BTC with a Gameboy, the digital asset will have fulfilled one of its flagship missions which is to promote the decentralization of the control of money.
Besides the surprising side of this information, all of the people who commented on its publication suggested that unless you have millions of years to spare, it is better to find other ways to obtain bitcoins ( BTC).
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