Don’t panic, the fact that you can now mine Bitcoin using a Commodore 64 doesn’t mean there’s going to be a world shortage of 8-bit C64’s, because it somehow turns out not to be profitable.
The YouTube channel, 8-Bit Show And Tell , has shown the Bitcoin Miner 64 software running on a standard Commodore 64.
Given that current Bitcoin ASICs are being measured in terahashes per second, and not just straight hashes per second, you can see why it’s going to take a while with the venerable C64.
That would net you 0.00000000000002 Bitcoin per year, and at 10 H/s on the 21W C64 that would still cost you around $22 per year to mine.
They note that the software they’re using is written in C, but they could potentially achieve a speedup of up to ten times if it was written in machine code.
Thankfully it’s a lot easier to build a gaming rig now there are no motherboard jumper switches, though he has been breaking technology ever since… at least he gets paid for it now.