Bitcoin mining fever has some severe symptoms. While some think it’s a good idea to mod a Gameboy to mine Bitcoin, others prefer the more retro Commodore 64 for that purpose. It certainly won’t rival any ASIC miner out there, but it still is an achievement worthy of being shared.

Who thought that when the Commodore 64 was launched in 1982, that it would eventually be used for crypto mining? For those who don’t know, the Commodore 64 is an 8-bit home computer developed by CBM featuring a MOS Technology 6510 processor clocked at 0.985-1,023MHz (depending on the version). The console had 64KB of RAM and 20KB of ROM was launched with an MSRP of $595.

Back then, the specifications were quite beefy, but aren’t exactly up to modern standards. Still, that doesn’t make the machine any less capable of cryptomining, as we see in 8-Bit Show and Tell’s video. Using YTM/Elysium’s Bitcoin Miner 64 and a few other adaptations, the Commodore 64 can successfully mine Bitcoin.

Mining performance was really bad, with a hash rate of 0.3H/s, but it could easily be 10x higher if the miner was built on Commodore 64’s language. The modder even used the SuperCPU 20MHz 65816 processor upgrade, which improved the C64’s mining performance by about 20x.

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KitGuru says: The viability of using a retro console to mine Bitcoin is quite low, but those who can pull such things deserve some merit. Do you have a Commodore 64 lying around in your house somewhere? 

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