A developer managed to turn a 1989 laptop into a cryptocurrency miner, but it's not going to make anyone rich anytime soon.
The computer in question is the Toshiba T3200SX, once the latest generation, which is powered by a 386 MHz Intel 16SX processor and runs MS-DOS. When it first hit the market, the T3200SX was available for the rock-bottom price of €6,299 (or €13,896 in current currency).
The architect of the mining project, Dmitrii Eliuseev, published a blog post describing his process, which included programming his own mining software for MS-DOS (now available on GitHub) and calculating potential earnings over time. weather.
Retro crypto mining platform
Turning unlikely hardware into Bitcoin miners has become something of a tradition in recent years; Smartphones, Raspberry Pis, and even Teslas have been used to mine cryptocurrencies. Thanks to Eliuseev, the Toshiba T3200SX now joins this prestigious list.
However, while the T3200SX is capable of mining Bitcoin, it achieves a throughput of only 15 hashes per second, which, according to Eliuseev, would produce a dollar worth of Bitcoin every 584 million years. Unsurprisingly, the 1100 Toshiba T1986 Plus did no better, producing 3,5 H/s with the same code.
For context, the highest performing ASIC miners on the market today produce 110 terahashes/second, 100 billion times more than the T3200SX. And Bitcoin mining farms are packed with several hundred of these ASICs.
As our sister site Tom's Hardware pointed out, there's more bad news for anyone looking to make a profit on the T3200SX. Under load, the laptop draws around 39W of power, which would cost the owner around €3.30 per month.
Unfortunately, therefore, mining Bitcoin on the T3200SX will make you the complete opposite of rich: for every dollar earned, you will lose €23.1 billion to the utility.
Through Tom's Hardware