You can mine Bitcoin on a Game Boy, but you probably shouldn’t

Bitcoin miners have passed the capabilities of consumer play equipment a few years ago, but PC graphics card prices are still off the charts. Of course, people who are hoping to get into cryptocurrency mining could buy a dedicated ASIC rig to mine digital currency, but there’s a much cheaper and less efficient way to get started: power up your old Game Boy.

That’s right, someone actually found a way to mine Bitcoin using a Nintendo Game Boy. And no, it’s not worth it – but it’s pretty amazing.

Using a Game Boy link cable, a Raspberry Pi Pico, and a custom code, a part-time computer security researcher and YouTuber Stacksmashing were able to turn a Nintendo Game Boy into the world’s worst Bitcoin miner.

Stacksmashing’s Bitcoin-mining game console can perform 0.8 hashes per second. Don’t worry too much about what this means; all you really need to know is that dedicated mining hardware runs about 125 billion times faster. According to the creator of the mod, at the pace of Game Boy, he will have his hard-earned Bitcoin in a few quadrillion years. On the rise, its Bitcoin miner costs much less to run. Just four AA batteries.

OK, so it’s not very useful, but the fact that it works at all is pretty impressive. Stacksmashing says he created an empty blockchain with less difficulty to test it, and the system managed to hash a full block.

Even so, getting the handheld game console to mine the blockchain was actually the easiest part – the hardest part was connecting it to the internet. Watch Stacksmashing’s full YouTube video for a look at how he persuaded a Raspberry Pi and the Game Boy Link Cable to connect the old Nintendo console to the internet, and more.