It seems as though everyone wants to get onto the cryptocurrency bandwagon in some way now, following the increasing acceptance of crypto across various online platforms and merchants, as well as the ongoing rally which has taken the price of Bitcoin to over $55,000 from around $6,000 this time last year. While most ordinary people will have to get onto crypto exchanges to buy tokens, it is widely known that the supply of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is limited, and that is one of the biggest reasons why their price rises rapidly in the face of high demand. The number of crypto tokens available in the market can only be increased through ‘mining’, which is a process where computers participate in solving complex mathematical problems to be rewarded with tokens for the effort i.e time and energy that has been put into it. Thus, crypto mining has become quite a large industry, with mining farms being set up all over the world to try and harness crypto units. However, while this activity is largely out of reach of regular users, one IT security researcher has been able to convert a handheld gaming console into a crypto mining device, which could be an interesting development to keep an eye on.
A person who goes by the username Stacksmashing posted a YouTube video, which shows how he used the hardware from the first GameBoy released by Nintendo in 1989 to mine Bitcoin. Early GameBoys had no wireless or internet capabilities, so he attached a Raspberry PI microcontroller board to the console’s link port, and a USB flash card to connect it to a BTC node running on his computer. He also wrote his own code to create the mining software that would run on the GameBoy, with the result that it was attempting to mine crypto at roughly 0.8 hashes per second. This may seem impressive, but as he said himself, it is extremely slow when compared to modern ASIC miners, which run at 100 Terahashes per second. At this rate, it would take this GameBoy a couple of quadrillion years to mine just one Bitcoin.
While this is not a realistic way to mine cryptocurrencies, it is nevertheless an interesting project which shows how other devices can be modified to mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The level of interest in cryptocurrencies is growing every day, with more and more sectors and companies beginning to use crypto in some manner to improve their operations and offer better quality to their users. One example of this can be seen in the online gambling industry, where we are seeing more and more casino operators beginning to use cryptocurrencies as a payment option, thereby allowing players to place bets through crypto. You can follow this site for more information on this trend, which has completely changed the way online casinos and betting sites operate, and shows the potential that crypto has to transform businesses. Therefore, it is not surprising that we are seeing so much interest in cryptocurrencies from the general public all over the world.
This is also not the first attempt to use gaming consoles to mine cryptocurrencies, since the newer consoles are generally quite powerful and have high processing capabilities. However, these consoles are not yet designed to be used for mining, which makes them largely ineffective for this purpose. There have been attempts to use the latest PlayStation console from Sony, as well as Nintendo’s Switch console, to mine cryptocurrencies, but these have all been unsuccessful so far. In any case, projects such as these are helping developers understand more about the crypto space while having some fun, so we can expect to see this trend continue, at least until game console manufacturers actually put products out that cater to crypto mining as well as gaming.
