Bitcoin Mining on Your Commodore 64

We already write about 8Bit Coin Retro Cryptocurrency.
We concluded ” it would be fun to mine it with some 64KB, or less, retro machine.”
But now lets do some mining on 8-bit 6510 processor running at just around 1MHz and with 64KB of RAM using serial port (1200 8N1) instead of TCP/IP!

Meet C64 Bitcoin Miner !

So finally we have low power, low memory footprint that can fit on 8 bit cpu in less than 64KB space and does not need dedicated GPU or mining equipment.

Commodore 64 Bitcoin miner is less than 12KB program for C64 that can run in demo mode or communicate with ntgbtminer  over serial link (1200 baud, 8N1) to access Bitcoin blockchain.

It is not very fast as 8 bit cpu’s does not handle 32 bit computations very efficiently, so it can do only 0.2 hash/s on PAL C64 (<1MHz) but it does exactly the same as every other miner does:

  •  Receive 76 bytes of block data to be hashed
  • Appending 32-bit nonce at the end
  • Twice hashing with `sha256` algorithm
  • Checking if result is smaller than the current blockchain difficulty value
  • If it is not smaller, increase nonce and tries againAnyway we expect of our readers to send us their mining rig C64 cluster 🙂

But wait there is even more there is also a Game Boy Bitcoin Miner and  ntgbtminer in links bellow as Bit Coin Miner / ntgbtminer was originally developed for Game Boy, until it was forked for Commodore 64 by Maciej Witkowiak.

Link:C64 Bitcoin Miner
Link:C64-ntgbtminer

Link:Game Boy Bitcoin Miner
Link:Game Boy edition-ntgbtminer