Is it possible to mine Bitcoins anywhere? Could an old Commodore 64 be powerful enough that people lose interest in mining using their graphics card? Probably not, but the fact that it is possible to modify a Commodore 64 to mine Bitcoins is certainly quite a remarkable task and one that is the curiosity of the day.
The Commodore 64 was originally released in 1982 by CBM, and has a MOS Technology 6510 processor that has an operating frequency of 1,023 MHz. This “PC” or console (depending on how you look at it) is equipped with just 64 KB of RAM and 20 KB of ROM , and at the time of its launch it was one of the most powerful computers out there. However, surely no one expected that almost 40 years later they would be used to mine cryptocurrencies (more than anything because they did not even exist), but it is what now in the middle of 2021 has happened.
Mining Bitcoins with a Commodore 64, how is it possible?
All this comes because a Youtuber (8-Bit Show And Tell) video game programmer and collector of retro computers has been entertaining himself in modifying his Commodore 64 to extract Bitcoins, simply for the fact of seeing if it can … and the result is that yes, you can, although obviously the result in terms of performance is not, let’s say, very good.
Actually, this is not the first attempt to adapt old PCs or consoles to mine cryptocurrencies; Last month we could already see how they used a Nintendo GameBoy to mine Bitcoins, and in fact the creator of this video that we have posted above affirms that it was his inspiration to try to do the same with a Commodore 64, a piece of hardware that is still oldest.
The mining performance of the Commodore 64 is around 0.3 h / s, but as the author says, the code is written in C programming language and not pure machine language, which could potentially provide a performance boost. 10 times greater. The Commodore 64 can also be upgraded with an additional expansion card called SuperCPU that increases performance even more (around 20 times more), something that the modder himself has verified.
Unfortunately, even with this speed increase it is not as efficient as any modern PC (and let’s not talk about ASIC miners ) which can reach up to 18 Terahash / s, but of course this news is still a very interesting curiosity.
Mine Bitcoins anywhere
There is no doubt that in the computer industry, programmers seem to be an endless source of curious news. Not long ago, it seems that the greatest desire of programmers was to be able to run DOOM or Quake on all kinds of devices, such as an Apple Watch or even on the screen integrated in a smart fridge, but now it seems this desire has changed for making any type of device capable of mining Bitcoins.
Thus, as we have commented before a few weeks ago that they showed how it was possible to use an old Nintendo Gameboy to mine Bitcoins and now the news has jumped because they have achieved it in a Commodore 64, a team that is already 39 years old. It is possible that in the coming weeks they will surprise us again by having your smart fridge or a car mine Bitcoins or something similar; who knows, of course with the number of modern devices that incorporate microchips the possibilities are almost endless.
