TECH NEWS – Is it a crazy question? Yes. The costs and the time it needs? Oh, even more so.

The Commodore 64 was a popular platform in the 80s and the first half of the 90s (especially in Eastern Europe). But it was never meant to do Bitcoin mining. It’s from a different era, where other matters were far more important. And yet, we have someone doing a test with the venerable C64.

The 8-Bit Show And Tell YouTube channel introduced a program called Bitcoin Miner 64. It runs on a regular, standard Commodore 64. The hash speed is not that fast (0.3 H/s). Let’s explain this in understandable terms: if you want to mine just ONE Bitcoin on a Commodore 64, you will need 50 trillion (10^12!) years. The energy costs would cost you about 1.1 quadrillion (10^15!) dollars. Oh, and you might also have to acquire an upgraded SuperCPU accelerator add-on to boost the performance of the good old C64.

The upgrade kicks up the C64’s hash speed to 10 H/s, which means that in a year, you would get 0.00000000000002 Bitcoin. The 10 H/s speed needs 21 watts for the C64, which would cost 22 dollars in a year. Multiply that by 50 trillion to get the 1.1 quadrillion. These are such large numbers we can’t even begin to describe them!

The software was written in C, but it might be up to ten (!) times faster if Bitcoin Miner 64 was done in machine code. In that case, you’d need „only” 5 trillion years and 0.11 quadrillion dollars. By then, Bitcoin might be extinct along with humanity (the Sun is supposedly gobbling up the Earth in 7-8 billion years), and even then, we didn’t even see what the C64 could do with Ethereum.

At least this upgraded Commodore 64 is faster than a Nintendo Game Boy.

Source: PCGamer