A developer has managed to show a laptop from 1989 right into a cryptocurrency mining machine, nevertheless it received’t be making anybody wealthy any time quickly.
The computer in query is the as soon as cutting-edge Toshiba T3200SX, which is powered by a 16MHz Intel 386SX processor and runs on MS-DOS. When it first hit the market, the T3200SX was out there on the low, low worth of $6,299 (or $13,896 in immediately’s cash).
The architect of the mining challenge, Dmitrii Eliuseev, has printed a blog post setting out his course of, which included programming his personal mining software for MS-DOS (now available on GitHub) and calculating potential earnings over time.
Retro crypto mining rig
Reworking unlikely {hardware} into Bitcoin mining machines has turn into one thing of a convention in recent times; smartphones, Raspberry Pis and even Teslas have been used to mine cryptocurrency. Because of Eliuseev, the Toshiba T3200SX now joins this prestigious listing.
Nonetheless, whereas the T3200SX is certainly able to mining Bitcoin, it achieves a efficiency of simply 15 hashes per second, which Eliuseev estimates would yield one greenback’s price of Bitcoin each 584 million years. Predictably, the Toshiba T1100 Plus from 1986 didn’t fare any higher, producing 3.5H/s working the identical code.
For context, probably the most performant ASIC miners in the marketplace immediately produce 110 terahashes/second, 100 trillion instances greater than the T3200SX. And Bitcoin mining farms are packed out with many a whole lot of those ASICs.
As famous by our sister website Tom’s {Hardware}, there’s extra dangerous information for anybody hoping to show a revenue utilizing the T3200SX. Beneath load, the laptop computer guzzles roughly 39W of energy, which might price the proprietor round $3.30/month.
Sadly, due to this fact, mining Bitcoin on the T3200SX will make you the other of wealthy: for each $1 earned, you’ll lose $23.1 billion to the utilities firm.
By way of Tom’s Hardware
