This year 2021 has continued to be marked by the computer component crisis, which has also resulted in the non-existence of next-generation consoles in stores for the second consecutive Christmas. However, the shortage of microchips has been present in our lives for four or five years. And it is that the theme 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 that were made with GPUs AMD Radeon and Nvidia GeForce to dedicate himself to professional mining of altcoins. They began to fill industrial warehouses and, although the market took a breather in 2019, the production stoppage suffered by the sector during the pandemic has ended up destroying the market. While Nvidia and AMD make plans to design cards that are purely for mining (so that miners don't influence the gamer market), other users have started looking other type of hardware to dedicate to mining.
Gold rush is now 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 have fun creating these types of programs for ordinary devices. Both to feed his curiosity and to give him a random chance. And it is that, no matter how powerful the device with which you perform the proof of work is, there will always be a slim chance that your machine ends up solving a block, that is, collecting the reward. In fact, a few years ago, Bitmain itself sold the Antrouter R1, which was a normal router with a small specific processor that worked like a “Bitcoin lottery”.
Can you mine with a Game Boy?
Something like this has been created by the youtuber Stackmashing, who has used the classic Game Boy to turn it into a bitcoin miners. For this, he used a Flash card to upload the software to the console. And secondly, you have connected the link cable to Raspberry Pi Peak, which brings connectivity features to the Game Boy that it never had originally. Thanks to this curious invention, the console can connect to other Bitcoin nodes, check the integrity of new blocks and generate new hashes to try to solve the next block in Satoshi Nakamoto's cryptocurrency chain.
But... Is it good for something?
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 second, while any modern ASIC can average 100 Terahashes in the same chunk of time. According to the creator of the video, it is possible that by the time the Game Boy manages to solve a block, a few quadrillion years have passed.
However, it is still curious experiment. If many more people entertain themselves doing projects like this, soon we will be able to buy graphics cards in our trusted store without breaking the bank in the attempt.