Monday, April 26th 2021
Commodore 64 Modded To Mine Bitcoin
We saw the modified Nintendo Game Boy last month which could crank out Bitcoins at a blistering 0.8 hashes per second or ~125 trillion times slower than a modern Bitcoin ASIC miner. If you are searching for something a bit more modest than the Game Boy take a look at the Commodore 64 which has been modded to achieve a Bitcoin mining rate of 0.3 hashes per second. The Commodore 64 was released by IBM in 1982 featuring the MOS Technology 6510 processor clocked at 1.023 MHz and paired with 64 KB RAM and 20 KB ROM.
While the Commodore currently falls behind the Game Boy there is hope on the horizon with the creator of the program claiming a 10x performance improvement to over 3 hashes per second is possible by re-writing the code in machine language. The commodore 64 can be further upgraded with the SuperCPU upgrade which boosts mining speeds to over 60 hashes per second completely destroying the Game Boy but still falling just short of the latest ASIC miners at ~18,000,000,000,000 hashes per second. Obviously, this demonstration was not meant as a practical application but it is interesting to see how cryptocurrency mining can be implemented on older hardware and the amazing rate of technological advancement we have seen over the last 40 years.
Demonstration Video
Sources:
8-Bit Show And Tell, C64 Bitcoin miner
While the Commodore currently falls behind the Game Boy there is hope on the horizon with the creator of the program claiming a 10x performance improvement to over 3 hashes per second is possible by re-writing the code in machine language. The commodore 64 can be further upgraded with the SuperCPU upgrade which boosts mining speeds to over 60 hashes per second completely destroying the Game Boy but still falling just short of the latest ASIC miners at ~18,000,000,000,000 hashes per second. Obviously, this demonstration was not meant as a practical application but it is interesting to see how cryptocurrency mining can be implemented on older hardware and the amazing rate of technological advancement we have seen over the last 40 years.
50 Comments on Commodore 64 Modded To Mine Bitcoin
Commodore never had a dedicated "business machine" division. Commodore was just Commodore.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_International
EDIT: Nevermind. As RTB point out, it looks like they did after all.
This isn't a serious use for it. It's more like a hobbyist project.Uh... from your article's opening.I like modding old hardware to do useless things. I wrote a NES game and burned it to cart that according to my brother "was the dumbest game in history."
He didn't know it was entirely designed from the getgo to annoy him. He hadn't even been born when the NES launched, but I had plans the moment he came into this world, see?
The game was a maze that if you touched the walls, screamed at you in an annoying synth tone and attempted to give you an eplieptic seizure with fun flashes (no he's not eplileptic, that wouldn't be funny). Fun. The character was a potato like being that was not at all modeled after my brother.
Amazingly you can still buy a C64 that works for a few hundred dollars considering we are talking about a computer that is almost 40 years old.
I'd like to see what other devices can be modified to mine, as mentioned, an I.O.T. fridge should be possible to mod, as should any "smart" TV and any device with a CPU.
So if you want to conduct an evil master plan for your IoT botnet, you should mine some of those cryptocurrencies which are just gaining traction, and mine at a rate which goes by unnoticed. I'd be surprised if someone isn't already doing this, I've heard of IoT botnets of toasters in the past, so someone must be doing mining too?
</sarcasm>
I remember when I first looked into Bitcoin, people were using 1-2 cards to mine hundreds of them in a matter of weeks. While I have sometimes pondered about what if I had just mined like 50 of them myself, I'm actually glad I didn't. While the profits on paper sounds amazing, in my country people who did make a profit on this can't use that money except for paying taxes.
In regards to bursting cryptobubbles, while there will probably be one or more Etherium bubbles coming "soon", there will ultimately also be a collapse of cryptocurrencies for speculation purposes, and when that happens, you'd better hope most real companies will get out in time. Many tech companies are already playing with it, and since most retirement funds are invested in such companies we can end up all taking a hit when this comes crumbling down. If this nonsense goes on for too long, the dot com bubble will be nothing compared to the big crypto bubble.
so can we mine on a appple watch
The C64 was made by Commodore Business Machines, not by IBM which had no ownership of CBM or of the C64.
The issue is these new coins are designed extensively to avoid asics, by making their PoW algorithm bandwidth intensive and memory hard. This means to design an ASIC for them you'd basically end up with a... gpu like device. It's benefits would be limited and the costs exclude anyone from even attempting it.
Ethereum as an example presently uses at minimum ~4.25GBs of memory for it's DAG PoW. And it's rising daily.