Someone Tried to Mine Bitcoin on a 1960s Punchcard Computer

[sgk]

Someone Tried to Mine Bitcoin on a 1960s Punchcard Computer

It long ago stopped being profitable (or even feasible) to mine Bitcoin on consumer-level hardware. So why not try it out on a computer primarily used by forward-thinking universities—an IBM mainframe that runs on assembly punchcards from the 1960s—to see whether or not it can compete with today's dedicated mining machines?

Ken Shirriff, a computer engineer, blogger, and retro hardware enthusiast, decided to find out. It ended as you might expect. The Computer History Museum's mainframe was indeed able to solve Bitcoin hashes—a series of math problems that are used to verify other users' Bitcoin transactions—but it did so at impossibly slow rates.

"While modern hardware can compute billions of hashes per second, the 1401 takes 80 seconds to compute a single hash," Shirriff wrote. "It would take more than the lifetime of the universe to successfully mine a block."

It looks like the IBM 1401 would be slightly more efficient than mining Bitcoin by hand. In practical terms, none of those mining techniques make any damn sense.





Source:
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/someone-tried-to-mine-bitcoin-on-a-1960s-punchcard-computer
http://www.righto.com/2015/05/bitcoin-mining-on-55-year-old-ibm-1401.html

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[Jeremycoin]

Do you guys realize know that we are in the future? By the way, this is a crazy but cool idea

[GigaBit]

I wonder how much coin they made back then...

Hey wait a minute... something ain't right here.... this ain't right at all!!
That's 2060's computer hard drive needed to run the core after the 20MB block increase.

[sgk]

I wonder how much coin they made back then...

 

From the article:
"To summarize, to mine a block at current difficulty, the IBM 1401 would take about 5x10^14 years (about 40,000 times the current age of the universe)."

[melody82]

Why?  Just Why?  People get such wacky ideas sometimes.  It is a tremendous amount of fun to see, but who would come up with an idea like that lol.

[alh]

Why?  Just Why?  People get such wacky ideas sometimes.  It is a tremendous amount of fun to see, but who would come up with an idea like that lol.

The title of this thread isn't very accurate. The article described is one guy that tried to implement the SHA256 function on a computer that's well over 50 years old. He talks about the difficulties he ran into and the incredible slowness. He wasn't trying to suggest that it made sense, any more than a "old car" guy tries to suggest that a car from the 1960"s compare favorably to a car today. I expect that his motivations were similar to that of the "old car guy" (IMHO).

I found it very entertaining.

[sgk]

Why?  Just Why?  People get such wacky ideas sometimes.  It is a tremendous amount of fun to see, but who would come up with an idea like that lol.

The title of this thread isn't very accurate. The article described is one guy that tried to implement the SHA256 function on a computer that's well over 50 years old. He talks about the difficulties he ran into and the incredible slowness. He wasn't trying to suggest that it made sense, any more than a "old car" guy tries to suggest that a car from the 1960"s compare favorably to a car today. I expect that his motivations were similar to that of the "old car guy" (IMHO).

I found it very entertaining.

Exactly.


The guy who carried out this experiment has also put a disclaimer at the end:

"I would like to be clear that I am not actually mining real Bitcoin on the IBM 1401—the Computer History Museum would probably disapprove of that. As I showed above, there's no way you could make money off mining on the IBM 1401. I did, however, really implement and run the SHA-256 algorithm on the IBM 1401, showing that mining is possible in theory. And if you're wondering how I found a successful hash, I simply used a block that had already been mined: block #286819."

[Bitdonator]

You will need a billion years to mine single satoshi with this 

[sgk]

You will need a billion years to mine single satoshi with this 

Yep, going by the calculations showcased in the article, it will take about 40,000 times the current age of the universe to find a block! 

But it was purely for experimental reasons and it was a cool idea