Apr 28, 2021 23:00:00

A fierce man mining Bitcoin on the Commodore 64 has appeared, how long does it take to analyze one block?

Since mining of virtual currencies such as Bitcoin involves complicated calculation work, it is necessary to use a machine with high-performance specifications in order to perform mining efficiently.

The YouTube channel 8-Bit Show And Tell , which handles retro PCs, has released a movie of an experiment to perform such virtual currency mining on the Commodore 64 8-bit home computer released nearly 40 years ago.

Bitcoin Mining on the Commodore 64? --YouTube


At the time of writing the article, the hash rate of the mining ASIC is about 100 tera H / s per second. In addition, in an experiment mined with the first Game Boy, which is a portable game machine, it was shown that it operates with 4 AA batteries and has a hash rate of 0.8 H / s, which is 1/125 trillion compared to ASIC. ..

A fierce man who mines Bitcoin with Game Boy appears, can be mined with 4 AA batteries --GIGAZINE

The Commodore 64 used by 8-Bit Show And Tell for mining is equipped with a microprocessor 'MOS 6510 ' with a CPU clock of 0.985MHz to 1.023Mhz, which is connected to a Windows PC to receive hashes and released by YTM. It is calculated by c64-bitcoin-miner.

The cable used to connect Windows and the Commodore 64 is for the printer, and the terminal on the printer side is an

RS-232 connector. It has a 25-pin shape, but when you look at the connector, the number of pins is not 25.

Of course, you can't connect this terminal to a modern Windows PC. Therefore, after biting the conversion connector, it seems that the Commodore 64 and the Windows PC are connected using the D-sub 9-pin-USB A cable.

According to 8-Bit Show And Tell, it takes 3.5 seconds to calculate one hash with the Commodore 64 alone, that is, the hash rate is about 0.3 H / s.

And 8-Bit Show And Tell improves the hash rate to 10H / s by using not only the embedded MOS 6510 but also the 20MHz CPU accelerator '

Super CPU ' released by Creative Micro Design in 1996. I succeeded in doing so.

According to the calculation of 8-Bit Show And Tell, it takes 337 years to analyze one block with Commodore 64 alone, and it takes about 15 years to speed up using Super CPU. In addition, PC Gamer , an IT news site, calculates that it will take 50 trillion years to mine 1 Bitcoin at the time of article creation, and it will cost about 1.1 trillion dollars (about 120 trillion yen) for energy cost alone.

According to 8-Bit Show And Tell, c64-bitcoin-miner is written in C language , and it is expected that the performance will jump 2.5 to 10 times further by writing it in machine language. ..