Your original Game Boy could mine a single Bitcoin after a few quadrillion years

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Everyone stop what you are doing right now and go dig up that old Game Boy out of the basement. Apparently, there’s more that you can do with a Game Boy besides playing the original Pokémon games. It has recently been revealed that the original 1989 handheld console from Nintendo can be used as the perfect Bitcoin miner.

Ok, so maybe perfect isn’t the right word. According to the YouTube channel stacksmashing, the original 8-bit Game Boy is technically capable of mining a Bitcoin with a bit of tinkering, though it may take a little while.

In a recent video posted on the YouTube channel mentioned above, the YouTuber utilized a Rasberry Pi Pico device in order to convert the handheld gaming device into a Bitcoin miner. Using a modified version of the link cable that us grandpas of gaming remember from trading Pokémon with our friends, they created a connection between the handheld device, Rasberry Pi Pico, and a PC to allow for Bitcoin mining.

You probably shouldn’t begin stockpiling Game Boys any time soon

While your Game Boy is technically capable of running the processes necessary to mine a Bitcoin, in reality, it would take literally millions of years for the handheld device to successfully mine a Bitcoin. Bitcoins now are mined by ASICs or Application Specific Integrated Circuits, which have hash rates of around 100 TRILLION hashes per second. Compared to the approximate 0.8 hash per second rate of the Game Boy, you can see why the handheld console is not necessarily the fastest miner available.

This is still a pretty impressive feat. Though we would all be long dead and gone before a Game Boy would be able to mine a Bitcoin, it’s still pretty cool to see that someone is capable of making the device actually work. Who knows, maybe the Game Boy Advance could mine a Bitcoin for your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Just a heads up, if you buy something through our links, we may get a small share of the sale. It’s one of the ways we keep the lights on here. Click here for more.