The recent cryptocurrency boom has brought more and more people into the world of mining to earn with the help of a good cooling system and high-end graphics cards (lately rare and unavailable), such as the NVIDIA RTX 3090. However, it seems possible to extract Bitcoin even on the famous portable console Nintendo Game Boy, as the YouTube channel of Stacksmashin.
Using the iconic Game Boy launched in the now distant 1989, a Game Boy Link cable and a microcomputer Raspberry Pi Pico, the guy was actually able to start mining the cryptocurrency. Although the author would have liked to use an unmodified Nintendo Game Boy, the device must necessarily connect to a Bitcoin node and the Bitcoin network in order to fully mine. As you probably already know, a 30-year-old battery-powered handheld console doesn't have an active network card, which is exactly where the Raspberry Pi comes into play.
The question arises at this point: it's worth a try? Most surprising of all is that it actually worked, but using a Game Boy to mine Bitcoin - as you might have guessed - it won't make you a fortune. The project in question has achieved a hash rate di 0,8 Th / s: in our dedicated article, we have explained in detail how Bitcoin mining works and what these terms mean-
The whole design is impressive and one thing that was particularly appreciated is the way they used the cable Game Boy Link, which was used to exchange Pokemon with friends, to connect it to the Raspberry Pi Pico. The extraction of a single Bitcoin, therefore, would require the Game Boy about a couple of quadrillion years.
Despite everything, the ingenuity of the author was appreciated by the users and still remains very fascinating, as he has found a way to renew an old device and make it useful. All the code used is . and links to it can be found below his YouTube video, in case anyone wants to try it on their own.
