Bitcoin Forum

Will mining be possible on next gen consoles (PS4, 720, etc.)

It is my understanding that PS4/720 will be using an AMD APU, will mining with consoles be profitable at all if possible?

Probably hard to answer, since both are not on the market yet  ;D but even if its possible, by the time of November it will only make sense to mine with an ASIC because the Diff will be through the roof.

Cheers

They could be reasonable for maybe scrypt, I don't know if there is yet enough details about the hardware to tell exactly.

I remember reading PS4 got about the same GFLOPS as 6870. So maybe you could get something around 300Kh/s with it. Just a guess.

Is this a joke? It's not possible. Maybe if you were able to install linux but I doubt they're going to allow that this time around.

Hackers love the phrase "That's not allowed", so they find a way to do it. OpenOS was removed from the ps3, so hackers put it back on. I think because the future ps4/xbox720 will have pretty much PC hardware it will be possible with a low level of modification. I am almost certain that the Xbox 720 will be able to run such code without needing Linux, as its OS will be derived from Windows 8 basic, which can already run CGMiner.

If it is possible/effective I wonder what effect this will have on mining difficulty.

If anything it will have a low effect, as people will have to understand that mining degrades your cards after a while (more intensively than gaming will). Also, you won't be able to game with the miner running, but during idle time it could be profitable. It wouldn't be power efficient at all though. It would be an excellent way of bringing popularity to Bitcoin and other alt currencies via the Gaming community. Alt coin mining on such consoles would be worth it though. When I get my ps4, I am going to look into hacking clients, figure out how its done, and maybe team up with some ps3 devs and work on it.

For BTC/SHA256, a 274 USD Jalapeno would do rather better than a 500 USD console. I'm rather inclined to say that BFL will eventually ship or someone else will. I think they have their pricing tiers down pat. I expect the same serious miners to convert their GPUs/FPGAs in ASICs and so the difficulty will be bumped by a factor of 10-20 and flatten out (I think they will keep the same level of investment). Even now the next gen consoles aren't very interesting to mine with though.

For LTC/scrypt, it might be a fun project to have a live distro or sth to mine the coins. Depending on how much electricity they consume it might be a viable project too. Otherwise, it's GPUs as usual for now.

But isn't the nextbox supposed to be always online? I would think that would prevent any form of hacking. Or at the very least make it extremely difficult. I can't remember if the ps4 will always be online as well. As far the ps4 hardware goes, I'm pretty sure that's going to be a thin line between pc hardware and console hardware. While it's x86, it will be capable of doing things modern pc's cannot. I think low level gpu access falls into that category.

Mining on gaming consoles will NOT be profitable.

You won't even be able to make up the cost of the electricity to runt he console!

It's a complete waste of time, don't even bother.


Let's look at the math:

When next generation gaming consoles come, let's say sometime in the fall, mining difficulty should be around 150 million. It could be much more, I'm being conservative with my estimate.

Let's assume that bitcoins are worth $200. Right now they are barely above $100 so I'm assuming they will double in value (a big assumption).

Let's say your gaming console is in range of the best GPUs currently available and can perform 800 megahashes/second (most likely it will be much much less).

Finally, let's say your console draws 250W and your electricity is 0.15 cents/KWH.

Let's plug it into the mining calculator...

You will make 0.0027 BTC per day or 0.54 cents a day. Power will cost you 0.90 cents a day, so you will lose 0.36 cents a day.

Not a good deal at all!

the always on feature is some anti-piracy method I heard. and forced auto-update

Mining on GPUs won't be profitable. Will you dump them or switch to another currency?

You will be able to mod the firmware to mine scrypt with it.

But it wont ever be usable as a gaming console then...

USB bootdrive with Linux on it, I say!

Look into hacking the ps3 and xbox 360 and their security measures. It isn't that easy. Nobody has hijacked the USB boot verification that the xbox uses, and neither have they bypassed the failsafe for the ps3 update usb file either. However, OpenOS has been hacked to be on the newer ps3 firmwares, and you can install Linux over that, so the ps3 could be a standing candidate currenctly, just with horrible speeds. Alt coin mining on the next gen consoles should be profitable though.

I was being a bit cheeky, but I'm sure ppl will find a way to hack it. It will be ugly, of course, otherwise it won't be a real hack :)

I believe in "when there is a will, there is a way". I also believe it will be even more "niche" than BTC mining at night on your boss' PC.

Of course, I'm pulling these predictions right from my backside :)

I think there will be get a way to get a Linux environment on the ps3 somehow, to the degree to get cgminer up. On the xbox I think once a kernel exploit in windows 8 is found, we can hijack it to run executable files.

Whatever happened to the good ole' modchips? Flip a switch: PS3, flip it again: CGMiner :)

I'm so not into console hacking right now, but why not "elegantly" bypass the console's OS altogether and install Linux on a separate HDD/USB key ghetto style? They's supposed to be very PC-like no (ignorance talking...) ?

I remember some issue with the first XBOX and the special firmware of HDDs, but it's been modded so I suppose the current ones could be too. (again, ignorance...)

I thought the PS4 was going to use an AMD APU, which we already have an idea of what those will be mining at.

As far as my understanding of modchips goes, one type consisted of replacement parts. They would basically be stock parts, but modified to remove or bypass security measures. These typically don't work, as most security is software based now anyways. The other type were ones that ran ontop of existing hardware. They injected data or controlled data and allowed people to hijack the security using the modchip code (which needed a kernel exploit to be manufactured afaik). I don't know too much about modchips, but that is my understanding of them. All of the consoles have them so far in some form (including JTAG), but the new consoles might not.

You bring up a good point with the "elegant" hard drive hack method because of their hardware. In the BIOS of the motherboard used, all they would need is to run a memory and OS software integrity check and it would certainly fail, resulting in a failed boot, or boot loop. Therefore that method would not work. Now if we somehow got the base keys to encrypt software like we did on the ps3, such a system could easily be bypassed, but I believe Sony learned their lesson this time around. I don't have too much hope in the ps4 hack potential, but with the xbox 720 (or infinity), i certainly do. It runs Basic Windows 8, so any windows 8 kernel exploit found could be ported to the xbox 720 (in theory). It also should be able to run .exe code with some modification (if its programs and apps don't already run on such a system). with that, we could simply run cgminer, and maybe even get computer graphics drivers that correspond with the actual card running too. Using windows 8 probably wasn't the best idea, unless they totally neutered it and removed various environment variables and such. Only time would tell.


You are correct. The xbox 720 will as well. The discussion is about hijacking the system's OS to run mining code.

Good point about the HDD check.

If I were a modder, I'd try a MITM method. Attach the HDD to "some device" (Arduino?) and try to interrupt the boot process at various points until I'm confident I can start the console and switch to another HDD/USB key to keep booting but with my OS instead. And I could put a switch to revert to normal boot :)

Of course this would totally fail if the BIOS does more than a boot check. I'd have to adapt (hence the Arduino - or other, in the middle).

Even if the BIOS did do a boot check, your MITM method could work. If anything, that may be one method that modchips use! Say you used the Arduino (very useful device btw), and you figured out the entire boot process. You could have the BIOS verify the stock hard drive on an unmodified OS, and once the boot check passes, you could flip hard drives using an exploit of some sort, booting whatever you want. However, an easy fix to this would to do a boot verification, verifying the OS checked was the OS booted. That also can be bypassed using some complicated stuff though too. Read on.

You could have the arduino intercept whatever code or hash the BIOS will check during the Boot Check and have it stored. Then switch hard drives and boot from the custom OS, but emulate the other OS on top of it (or just the hash checked) and have it report that when the Boot Verification process would be called. After that check passes, you could then reinstate the custom OS and run it like normal. However to fix that too, the BIOS could run a Persistant OS Check, checking the OS signature every X amount of time. That can also be bypassed by masking the OS somehow using some exploit, and just freezing the original OS "check hash" in the memory, so that key keeps getting pulled while the custom OS runs.

There are a lot of ways you can go about bypassing BIOS checks. But there are a lot of ways to counter them as well. I wan't to learn how to program code so bad so I can hack systems myself, I just haven't taken time to figure out, 1. what language(s) would be necessary for exploit research and hack programming, and 2. actually learning such languages. It's something I'll eventually get around to, I just need some advice.

Or we're going on about it the wrong way. What about an XBLA program for mining?

That actually wouldn't be a bad idea! Get the console into dev mode to develop our own code! Nice idea! I have no clue if the XNA Framework required is capable of generating SHA256d hashes as I am unaware of its limitations. That would be a great "soft-hack" method to go about using! Xbox uses C# right?

Apparently the XNA framework's (C++ for .NET) documentation is for C# but it can be accessed in C#, managed C++, iron python, VB.NET or other .NET languages.

Not sure if it would be published on XBLA if it's not in C# though. Maybe install it via a ghetto installer?

Ok, so we could basically reprogram cgminer in C++ using the XNA Framework. The program wouldn't get hosted on Xbox Marketplace though, as I'm sure it probably breaks the Terms of Use somewhere, and their rules. 1. It's not even a game, or useful app to the majority of the public. Wouldn't be a bad thing though to promote Bitcoin. What we would need people to do is set up a Developer account, put their xbox into developer mode, and shoot the code over to the xbox for "beta testing".

We wouldn't know, different programs operate differnet, I'm assuming someone would have to create a entire different miner for the PS4 etc.
This would be difficult to start now, because we don't know the final details on the consoles.

It sounds like it's possible, doesn't mean it's going to be profitable.

C++ is a pretty versatile language. AFAIK almost every console runs it.

Also, the miner theoretically wouldn't have to be completely rebuilt for the ps4. If the hardware leaks are correct about the stuff basically being PC hardware, all we would need is an exploit that can bootstrap a Linux environment sufficient enough to run the code. No modification to the miner would be necessary. Such a feat has been accomplished on the ps3.

Also all of the discussion above is about the Xbox 720, since it runs Windows 8 Basic, and has just been built on top of that, it should accept almost any language with its redistributable (Leading me to think XNA Framework is going to be modified for it). Also with some hacking, we could potentially get the xbox to accept CGI executable programs and get cgminer running from the start (assuming its hardware essentially runs just like a computer). We wouldn't need to get a Linux environment emulated at all.

The only issue with these two consoles are their BIOS. The motherboard shouldn't be an issue, but the way the BIOS interacts with the hardware could potentially be different. If so, the miners would have to be modified to interact with the hardware.

Also, it wouldn't be profitable for Bitcoin, yes. Would it raise its awareness among the gamer crowd? Yes. However, we mainly are looking at its profitability for mining alt coins.

If you develop against the Microsoft XNA framework, the good thing is you can potentially run your soft on  XBOX360 (creator's club membership at 99USD/year required to publich on XBLA after peer review and soft is not free but you get 70% of the sales), and, after converting with monogame.net, iOS, Android, Windows (both OpenGL and DirectX), Mac OS X, Linux, Windows 8 Store, Windows Phone 8, PlayStation Mobile, and the OUYA console.

Nice.

Just thinking of the life expectancy of the previous gen PS3 and Xbox360... Even if it is possible to mine, I would advise against it.

Your PS4 / Xbox720 would probably die within 3 months. (1 month if you own a cat)



I am however really curious to see how fast it could hash lite/bitcoins

Oh dude that is true also. That is directly related to overheating issues due to the complex PowerPC architecture they used. Now that they use normal computer hardware, the systems could be cooled more efficently, as they will run more efficiently.

I was thinking about the next gen consoles and mining on them. If Sony or Microsoft indeed do use the AMD 7000 series GPUs, wouldn't it be potentially possible to remove the GPU, and put in a 7950 and mine on that without any software modifications? I don't believe it should cause too many issues, but then again, I don't know how graphics drivers control the cards.

There should be no technical reason you can't mine BTC on the next-gen consoles and conceivably pull in around 500MHs. What's unclear is how easy or not it will be to run home-grown binaries on the new consoles.

I suppose someone could make a Bitcoin mining app and offer it for sale at the console online stores, assuming MSFT or SONY approve such utility apps.

Well we discussed above the potential for the binaries to work. Since the xbox 720 will use windows 8 basic, with a simple package (maybe not even at all), we could probably run a modified version of CGMiner. Depends on the AMD SDK.

For the ps4, it is harder for binary loading, as you would need to emulate a Linux environment on the system, then run the code.

There are rumors that the xbox 720 will sport a AMD Radeon HD 7790. That should be capable of pulling around 250 MH/s each card. There is also a rumor for a dual GPUs, so your 500 MH/s target isn't off at all from the current rumors. The ps4 is just reported to use a "next-gen" AMD GPU. 500 MH/s for these other altcoins isnt that bad.

http://hackaday.com/2013/03/25/mining-bitcoins-on-a-nintendo/ (http://hackaday.com/2013/03/25/mining-bitcoins-on-a-nintendo/)

That's really interesting. So by hijacking BIOS to load arbitrary code with a kernel exploit, he had the console generate hashes and sent them to the Raspberry Pi. However, thats because the NES didn't have networking. With these Next-Gen consoles, we are aiming to isolate control over their graphics processing. No RaspberryPi would be necessary unless it was possible to wire it into the GPU manually without the need of a software hack. That would be very hard though.

That might or not be an issue, there is no precedent AFAIK.

There are also ways to "import" programs on your console, it's more complicated (fits right into the BTC Ghetto alley, I'd say), but nothing the BTC community can't handle ;)

I'm thinking XBLA mini-game + mining? Display the hashing process in a "funny" way, that you can +/- play with on screen (not touching the actual hashing)? :)

Any XBLA Bitcoiner out there?

I forsee a Botnet of nextgen consoles all mining for someone XD

Yes, both the PS4 and the XB1 are going to be using an AMD APU, with an 8-core AMD CPU and an unknown AMD GPU counterpart. The XB1 will use DDR3 RAM, while the PS4 will use GDDR5 RAM. I suspect neither will be amazing for BTC mining, but the PS4 might be a little better for Litecoin.

Either way, they're using components that are VERY similar to what we have out in the PC market today, so I don't expect the hashrate to be amazing.

So, the XBOX One will have 2 VMs. One with XBOX OS and the other with Win8 kernel, both available at the same time.

Not sure it's a useful bit of info here, but I find it interesting to use a hypervisor on a console. I wonder whether it will be possible to replace either VM...

Great for any scamcoinnew altcoin that comes up though.


With a kernel exploit in either VM you could use it to bootstrap in a third VM or with a buffer overflow exploit point the crash towards a data package containing the boot process for a Linux distro

I think the issue is with the networking, xbox live is closed off, yet the Xbox One console needs to connect once every 24 hours to function.

So you have to get around xbox live. With PS4 it should be easier... theoretically.

Why would networking be an issue at all? All we need to do is get the code onto the system, which isn't that hard when using the XBL Development firmware. If I kick my system into developer mode, I can push whatever code I want to the system for testing. Anyone can get developer status. Hacked consoles wouldn't need it. Once you have the software working, have it communicate with any pool. If it can't connect to a pool, direct all traffic to the pool by using a RaspberryPi or any other system as a proxy. If anything hijack the data stream from the console back to your dev computer and direct the hash data through that stream to a pool.