This year 2021 has continued to be marked by the computer component crisis, which has also resulted in the absence of new generation consoles in stores for the second consecutive Christmas. However, the shortage of microchips has been in our lives for four to five years. And it is that the subject of the electronic mining It had already turned the graphics card market upside down back in 2017.
For the first time, it was companies and not individuals who were getting GPUs AMD Radeon and Nvidia GeForce to dedicate to the professional mining of altcoins. They began to fill industrial buildings and, although the market had a respite in 2019, the production stop that the sector suffered during the pandemic has ended up destroying the market. While Nvidia and AMD make plans to design cards that are solely for mining (and thus miners do not influence the player market), other users have started looking other types of hardware to engage in mining.
The gold rush is now the silicon rush
By now in the movie, you probably know that any electronic device can be used to mine cryptocurrencies. From a Bitmain ASIC, specifically designed to create hashes of the Bitcoin algorithm and be extremely efficient, to the processor of any smart appliance you have at home.
In most cases, electronic mining consume more money in the form of energy than the return you get in the form of a reward from the blockchain. However, many programmers enjoy creating these types of programs for ordinary devices. As much to feed your curiosity as to give you a random chance. And it is that, no matter how powerful the device with which you carry out the work test is, there will always be a tiny possibility that your machine will end up solving a block, that is, to collect the reward. In fact, a few years ago, Bitmain itself was selling the Antrouter R1, which was an ordinary router with a specific little processor that worked like a ‘Bitcoin lottery’.
Can you mine with a Game Boy?
Something like this has created the youtuber Stackmashing, who has used the classic Game boy to turn it into a bitcoin miner. To do this, he has used a Flash card to upload the software to the console. And secondly, you have connected the Cable Link to a Raspberry Pi Pico, which gives the Game Boy connectivity features that it never had originally. Thanks to this curious invention, the console can connect to other Bitcoin nodes, check the integrity of the new blocks and generate new hashes to try to solve the next block in the chain of Satoshi Nakamoto’s cryptocurrency.
But … is it good for anything?
If you are wondering if it is useful to mine with this hardware, we already anticipate that it is not. The console is capable of processing 0.8 hashes per secondwhereas any modern ASIC can average 100 Terahashes in the same chunk of time. According to the creator of the video, it is possible that when the Game Boy manages to solve a block, it will be a few quadrillion years.
However, the experiment. If many more people are entertaining themselves doing projects like this, we will soon be able to buy graphics cards in our trusted store without having to leave a kidney trying.
