This year 2021 has continued to be marked by the crisis of computer components , which has also resulted in the absence of new generation consoles in stores for the second consecutive Christmas. However, the shortage of microchips has been in our lives for four or five years. And is that the issue of electronic mining had already turned the graphics card market upside down back in 2017.
For the first time, companies, not individuals, were turning to AMD Radeon and Nvidia GeForce GPUs to pursue professional altcoin mining. They began to fill industrial warehouses and, although the market had a break in 2019, the production stop that the sector suffered during the pandemic has ended up destroying the market. While Nvidia and AMD are planning to design cards that are solely for mining (and thus miners do not influence the gamer market), other users have started looking for other types of hardware to engage in mining .
The gold rush is now the silicon rush
At this point in the movie, you probably know that any electronic device can be used to mine cryptocurrencies . From a Bitmain ASIC, specifically designed to create hashes of the Bitcoin algorithm and be extremely efficient, to the processor of any smart appliance you have at home.
In most cases, electronic mining consumes more money in the form of energy than the return that is obtained in the form of reward from the blockchain. However, many programmers enjoy creating these types of programs for ordinary devices. As much for fueling his curiosity as for giving him a random chance . And it is that, no matter how powerful the device with which you carry out the work test is, there will always be a tiny possibility that your machine will end up solving a block, that is, to collect the reward. In fact, a few years ago, Bitmain itself was selling the Antrouter R1, which was an ordinary router with a specific little processor that worked like a “Bitcoin lottery.”
Can you mine with a Game Boy?
Something like this has created the youtuber Stackmashing, who has used the classic Game Boy to turn it into a Bitcoin miner . To do this, you have used a Flash Card to upload the software to the console. And secondly, you’ve plugged the Link Cable into a Raspberry Pi Pico , giving the Game Boy connectivity features it never had originally. Thanks to this curious invention, the console can connect to other Bitcoin nodes, check the integrity of the new blocks and generate new hashes to try to solve the next block in the chain of Satoshi Nakamoto’s cryptocurrency.