Bitcoin Mining Game Boy Mod Goes For The Money

The Nintendo Game Boy was one of the more popular early portable game consoles on the market. Typically, the Game Boy was used to play black-and-white games on the go. One Game Boy owner has performed an interesting mod to his portable console allowing it to mine Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is one of the more valuable and popular of cryptocurrencies currently around. The project required the modder to start with a basic Game Boy and a Raspberry Pi Pico developer board used as a link cable to a USB adapter. The Pi was then connected to a computer to provide the Internet connection required to mine Bitcoin.

As cool as the Bitcoin mining Game Boy is, it's incredibly slow for the task. Consider a current generation ASIC miners able to pump out about 100 terahashes per second while the Game Boy can only pump out 0.8 hashes per second. You begin to get an idea of just how slow the process is on the portable Nintendo console. That's approximately 125 trillion times slower than the current-generation ASIC miner.

Anyone looking to make actual money in Bitcoin will want to skip right over the Game Boy mod. Essentially, the Game Boy will never mine a single bitcoin making this more of a project just to see if it can happen than a useful modification.

Despite the mod's limited practicality, it's always cool to see somebody whip up something interesting like this. There is no mention of what it took to create the software that was undoubtedly required for the mining operations. It doesn't sound as if the hardware was particularly expensive to acquire.