Mining Bitcoin Using Old Computers and Retro Gaming Consoles

[ivanpoldark]

Bitcoin mining has grown into a vast economy over the past few years as large ASIC-powered mining farms process transactions for the $32 billion dollar market. In the early days, people could mine bitcoins using their central processing units (CPU) and they still can, but the undertaking is extremely inefficient. However, a few people still mess around mining bitcoins using older computers and retro devices merely for the fun of it and for experimentation purposes.

Bitcoin Mining With Classic Computers and Retro Gaming Consoles

The bitcoin mining ecosystem is a competitive environment of pools processing transactions while simultaneously securing the network. Miners run special software and use application-specific integrated circuitry (ASIC) to mine bitcoins these days, using chips far more efficient than your standard CPU. Currently, older computers can mine bitcoins at a prolonged rate, but it’s still pretty cool to see if a classic system can perform the task of bitcoin mining.

One bitcoin enthusiast has done just that a few times with older computers. Ken Shirriff is well-known in the bitcoin community for his work on getting the bitcoin symbol added to Unicode. Shirriff also has a popular blog where writes about his projects and how he has mined bitcoins using classic devices from the past. Just recently Shirriff has been working on a Xerox Alto restoration and managed to get the seventies built computer to mine bitcoins at 1.5 hashes/second. The Xerox Alto is a well-known computer classic that was the first device to support a graphical user interface (GUI) in 1973.

“I’ve been restoring a Xerox Alto minicomputer from the 1970s and figured it would be interesting to see if it could mine bitcoins,” explains Shirriff.

        "I coded up the necessary hash algorithm in BCPL (the old programming language used by the Alto) and found that although the mining algorithm ran, the Alto was so slow that it would take many times the lifetime of the universe to successfully mine bitcoins."

The computer’s 1.5 blocks per second is significantly slower than the chips used today. Shirriff details the Xerox Alto’s speed would take “5000 times the age of the universe” to mine one block. For demonstration purposes, Shirriff used the input of a successfully mined block to see if the algorithm succeeded. Shirriff’s code is available on Github for those who would like to try out Xerox Alto mining.     

Read more
https://news.bitcoin.com/mining-bitcoin-old-computers-retro-gaming-consoles/

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[NotFuzzyWarm]

Pretty much a pointless copy/paste of part of a news article. 
If you are going to point out an article of interest just give your comment and link to it....

[VelureBit]

Honestly, nowadays it is not profitable to mine bitcoins on personal PC.

But a few years ago I downloaded bitcoing miner (can't remember the exact name) and started to mine....
In 1st 30 seconds my pc started to switch off\on my monitor and cooler wat about to fly away as a helicopter

Then I stopped mining at home

[Termin4tor]

Pretty much a pointless copy/paste of part of a news article.  
If you are going to point out an article of interest just give your comment and link to it....

Also I would like to point out that its preferably better to post this in the press section of this forum.

Here : https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=77.0

[Hui8]

Yes I'm doing it (trying it) but it seems pretty difficult. However one of my friend is all into CPU and GPU. He is using I core 4 processors which gives out about 25 H/s which can mine altcoin pretty well if we did on large scale. Like thousand times greater than that. :-)

[maeusi]

For mining easy altcoins, the retro hardware could work although it even would be hard to mine bcn with it. But for fun it is a nice experiment.

[ss890]

Yes I'm doing it (trying it) but it seems pretty difficult. However one of my friend is all into CPU and GPU. He is using I core 4 processors which gives out about 25 H/s which can mine altcoin pretty well if we did on large scale. Like thousand times greater than that. :-)

Doesn't seem to be that powerful. That would cost you a lot of "time" to mine bitcoin or altcoin. I believe that bitcoin would be way harder to mine with only GPU/CPU. Better go for altcoins like litecoin or Zcash which are having less difficulty as compared to bitcoin.

[Alex-Z]

But a lot you can get gold with an old pick?))

[ViceOfBTC21]

No. You can't make money when you mine on your gaming PC rig. You should mine it 4 years ago. And for mining bitcoin using old computers and retro gaming consoles, then you will just waste electricity.

[Igebotz]

i think mining bitcoin on old PC  is waste of money it just consume energy and your effort  and you can just earn few dollars a month waste of time and energy. and it can destroy your pc.

[efeaydin]

It is just a waste of money, time and electricity.

[Farfenkugel]

Your computers and cards are probably not designed to put in the effort that is needed to mine coins.

Many people fried there HD cards after a few days/weeks. The costs by destroying your computer is much higher then those few mines you can mine with some consoles,etc..

Instead of buying a new computer after you friend it ( only matter of time ) i suggest you sell all those consoles and buy some good mining equipment

[gilangIDR]

Mining is an activity that must be done in accordance with the times. So we have to adjust the best hardware conditions, hardware that has exceeded 2 years time usually will not generate profits. Profits generated from old hardware will not cover the operational costs we spend.

[mondobitcoin]

It is just a waste of money, time and electricity.

Yes i totally agree your opinion
Maybe the old computers can be modified for work properly for mining, but i think the actual new hardware its better optimized for doing it.

[coolcoinz]

A pointless research. He might as well calculate the chip's power on paper and estimate its hash power without coding and trying it out.
It's obvious that any computer can be configured to mine. You could do it with those old giant rigs NASA used in the 70's or an old IBM mainframe, but you'd probably pay $100 a day for electricity if you tried. Those things weren't made for home use.
On second thought I'd like to see someone try to mine a CPU coin on a 100 core system like the z12

[TheGreatPython]

It’s a great idea, but it might to be very productive and energy efficient to use, since latest miners are using the latest technology in the market and are high end gadgets, the miners can generate bitcoins for you anyways but they will not be as efficient as the latest miners

[AMHURSICKUS]

In my own opinion it not acceptable, because its just a waste of time, effort, electricty and etc. Most of miners use the new technology and that old pc is not peferable to use for mining.

[CoinChili]

ASICS ruled in mining bitcoins, mining with OLD PC could be fun for enthusiasts person that don't aim profitability.

[bebrave]

Instead of mining do you think it would be better to buy shares in the companies who provide the software for mining, i.e. AMD and NVIDIA processors

[Zhukov0]

It is just an interesting story and nothing else. It was possible to mine with it when it started, not anymore.