Commodore 64 is the new Bitcoin mining tool
As if devices like Nintendo GameBoy, Raspberry Pi and even toasters weren’t ridiculous enough to mine Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum or I know what a nation of cryptocurrencies, find out that you can even with a fossil about 40 year old.
Yes, more recently you can mine using the old Commodore 64 and, although it will grow a Gandalf beard until you manage to make a minimum MINIMUM profit, at least it works… Somehow.
Commodore 64 – To cryptocurrencies forward, to war back
To achieve this performance, the user 8-Bit Show and Tell, used the C64 Bitcoin Miner, an open-source software needed to mine cryptocurrencies on Commodore 64. The result?
You’re going to lose about every month, but the computer stoically endures. It operates on a… 1.0MHz processor that can process 0.2 hash / s for mining. To this is added the consumption (about 21W), the cost per KWh and the small fee depending on the cryptocurrency, so the user loses $ 3 and 48 cents per month.
Commodore 64 doesn’t get along very well with 32-bit processing, so it’s kind of understandable. In fact, you can use a SuperCPU-type processor accelerator, which our man did.
It forced the frequency, reaching 20MHz, and this impulse led to an increase in the mining speed, ie 0.3 seconds, compared to the hash rate of 3.5 seconds on the frequency of 1MHz. Moreover, once optimized as per the book, SuperCPU managed to increase the speed of mining cryptocurrencies to a maximum of 0.1 seconds, an admirable effort for a technological relic.