6 weirdest gadgets folks have used to mine Bitcoin and crypto

There’s one thing about Bitcoin and blockchain that simply appears to draw bizarre and wacky tinkerers.

Whereas computationally highly effective ASIC miners dominate proof-of-work crypto mining as we speak, that hasn’t stopped progressive crypto miners from utilizing every little thing from Sport Boys to the Apollo moon mission steerage pc to assist safe the community. 

Journal has gathered a few of the strangest issues folks have tried to mine cryptocurrency with, and also you’ll be astounded on the ingenuity.

Press X to mine Bitcoin

In case your mother has ever given you a tough time about your gaming habits, inform her you’re merely researching consumer-grade crypto mining {hardware}.

PlayStation consoles had been used to mine cryptocurrency for years.

In 2021, Ukraine’s Safety Service reported that it had busted a cryptocurrency mining operation that allegedly stole as much as $260,000 value of electrical energy every month. 

5 thousand gadgets had been seized by authorities, with 3,800 of them being what appear to be PlayStation 4 consoles, together with 500 graphics playing cards, 50 CPUs, notebooks, telephones, and flash drives.

Then, a number of years later, reviews emerged that pc {hardware} producer ASRock had constructed a brand new $15,000 cryptomining rig that utilized 12 AMD BC-250 mining playing cards, a cut-down model of the chip used within the Sony PlayStation 5. 

Every rig reportedly might mine as much as 610 MH/s when mining Ethereum, again when it used proof-of-work.

YouTubers caught on to the method in 2024, working their very own experiments on the BC-250 processors to mine crypto. 

Mining Bitcoin with a botnet of CCTV cameras

After all, who can neglect about sensible gadgets? 

In 2017, IBM researchers found a variant of the Mirai botnet tuned for mining Bitcoin, which was value about $1,300 on the time. 

The Mirai botnet was first recognized by safety researchers in August 2016 after it was used to contaminate 1000’s of sensible gadgets to carry out large-scale distributed denial-of-service assaults (principally spamming a server till it crashes). 

Mirai was the title of the instrument that scanned the web for Web of Issues (IoT) gadgets configured with manufacturing facility default credentials, which made them simple enlistees of a worldwide bot military. 

A month later, its supply code was leaked, and in 2017, menace actors had the nifty concept of customizing the botnet to try to mine Bitcoin, with peak exercise round March 2017. 

The Bitcoin Mirai malware focused Linux machines working BusyBox, probably the most extensively used Linux instruments for internet-connected gadgets. Darktrace recognized one occasion of the Mirai malware infecting a DVR digital camera belonging to an organization in Canada. 

However researchers from IBM’s X-Drive questioned its success, as mining Bitcoin on the time already required highly effective ASIC miners to also have a probability of successful a block reward.

“Given Mirai’s energy to contaminate 1000’s of machines at a time, nonetheless, there’s a chance that the Bitcoin miners might work collectively in tandem as one giant miner consortium,” stated the researchers. So who is aware of, they may have hit the jackpot.

Mining on a Sport Boy, as a result of why not

In the identical approach you may mow your garden with scissors, you may technically mine Bitcoin on an old-school ’90s Nintendo Sport Boy — although we’re probably not positive why anybody would wish to. 

In 2021, YouTuber stacksmashing repurposed an outdated Nintendo Sport Boy utilizing a Raspberry Pi Pico, a hyperlink cable and a few customized software program. 

The mining course of is carried out on the Sport Boy (initially launched in Japan in April 1989) with a little bit of coding wizardry, whereas communication with the Bitcoin community is dealt with by a pc through a voltage-modified hyperlink cable.

The method entails getting the Sport Boy to run a customized ROM (read-only reminiscence picture), utilizing the identical firmware that Trezor’s {hardware} pockets makes use of for its SHA-256 implementation. 

The Sport Boy Bitcoin miner code is comparatively easy: it consists of an limitless loop that first receives the block knowledge and goal worth from the pc, then begins mining, checks the hash towards the goal worth, and both sends the profitable nonce again to the pc or begins the method once more.

In response to stacksmashing, you may really hear it working because the Sport Boy provides off a selected “whine” because it strains with the computations essential to win a Bitcoin block. 

“The hashrate is fairly spectacular, roughly 0.8 hashes per second. In case you examine that to fashionable ASIC miners, which are available at round 100 terahashes per second, you may see that we’re virtually as quick, solely off by an element of 125 trillion,” he stated, jokingly. 

Stacksmashing estimates it will take a few quadrillion years to win a Bitcoin block at that charge. 

“Clearly, mining Bitcoin on a Sport Boy is something however worthwhile, however I realized lots of issues whereas constructing this and positively had a ton of enjoyable,” he stated. 

Mining Bitcoin on the pc that went to the Moon

What’s slower than a Sport Boy? In response to classic pc restorer Ken Shirriff, it’s the pc that acquired Apollo mission astronauts, together with Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, to the moon.

The Apollo Steerage Laptop was developed within the Sixties. It was constructed at a time when most computer systems had been the dimensions of a whole room.

Which was why the Apollo Steerage Laptop was a marvel on the time. It could possibly be used for steerage, navigation and management of the spacecraft whereas being sufficiently small to fly to area. 

In 2019, Shirriff tried to mine Bitcoin on it. 

“Attempting to mine Bitcoin on this Sixties pc appeared each pointless and anachronistic, so I needed to give it a shot,” he wrote in a prolonged write-up. 

Shirriff stated it was a large problem to get the Apollo Steerage Laptop to play ball. The {hardware} was basically incompatible, and the reminiscence was laughably low.

Even loading this system essential to mine Bitcoin was difficult, in line with Shirriff. Within the Sixties, code for the AGC was written on punch playing cards and assembled onto tape utilizing a software program system known as YUL, and software program was bodily woven into bundles of wires threaded via magnetic ferrite cores (known as Core Rope Reminiscence).

Since that sort of expertise takes weeks to fabricate, Shirriff had to make use of a core rope simulator as a substitute to load and run the Bitcoin program, counting on self-written software program and a customized board to load the code into the AGC. 

In the long run, Shirriff stated he achieved roughly 10.3 seconds per hash, or 0.10 hashes per second.

To place it into perspective, Shirriff stated it’s so sluggish that it will take 1,000,000 occasions the age of the universe to efficiently mine a Bitcoin block. 

However even that’s not the slowest strategy to do it.

Mine Bitcoin with a pen and paper

Shirriff once more proves that something is feasible with sufficient time. Years earlier than his Apollo pc experiment, Shirriff demonstrated that you may technically mine Bitcoin with a pen and paper, so long as you’ve gotten appreciable endurance (and scientists have solved immortality).

“I made a decision to see how sensible it will be to mine Bitcoin with pencil and paper. It seems that the SHA-256 algorithm used for mining is fairly easy and might, in reality, be finished by hand,” he wrote in a weblog. 

In a YouTube video, Shirriff accomplished one fairly painful-looking spherical of SHA-256 in 16 minutes and 45 seconds.

With 128 required for a full Bitcoin block, meaning it will take him roughly 1.5 days to hash it. This equates to a blistering 0.67 hashes per day.

For comparability, Bitmain’s Antminer S21 Professional has a hashrate of 234 terahashes per second, which is about 30 quintillion occasions quicker than doing it by hand. 

“Not surprisingly, the method is extraordinarily sluggish in comparison with {hardware} mining and is solely impractical.”

No less than we now have a Bitcoin mining answer in case the world ever loses energy. 

Microsoft thought-about mining crypto along with your mind

In 2019, Microsoft filed a patent within the US that describes utilizing physique exercise, corresponding to mind waves and facial actions, as a type of “proof-of-work” in a cryptocurrency system. 

The essential concept of the applying, titled “Cryptocurrency System Utilizing Physique Exercise Knowledge,” is {that a} person’s bodily features will function their “proof-of-humanity” that permits them to be paid for performing a activity, like watching advertisements, utilizing a search engine, or fixing CAPTCHA puzzles. 

This might embrace something from mind waves, physique temperature and coronary heart charge, to eye or facial actions — principally something that people do unconsciously that might be exhausting for a machine to spoof. 

This knowledge turns into their proof-of-work (or proof-of-human-effort). If the body-activity knowledge meets the circumstances, the system treats it as a legitimate mining outcome and rewards cryptocurrency to the person. 

Inventors behind the applying, Dustin Abramson, Derrick Fu, and Joseph Johnson Jr. stated the system is an alternative choice to the computationally intensive Bitcoin mining mannequin, the place miners compete to resolve difficult puzzles utilizing machines.

“As a substitute of huge computation work required by some typical cryptocurrency methods, knowledge generated based mostly on the physique exercise of the person is usually a proof-of-work, and subsequently, a person can remedy the computationally troublesome drawback unconsciously,” the inventors stated. 

Nonetheless, the latest data point out that the patent software was deserted as of 2021.

Curiously, Abramson and Johnson are additionally the identical inventors behind a patent that describes turning deceased family members into conversational AI chatbots (Black Mirror, anybody?), which was granted in 2021. 

Fortunately, it doesn’t appear to be something has come of this… but. 

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Felix Ng

Felix Ng is the APAC Editor and a author at Cointelegraphh. He first started writing concerning the crypto and blockchain business in 2015 via the lens of a playing business journalist. Since 2022, he has served as Information Editor APAC and author at Cointelegraph. He’s additionally a options author for Cointelegraph Journal, with works together with Large Questions, Journeys, and Insiders.