A Skilled Player
So, did he actually mine anything?
Written by｜Aria
Reprinted with permission from: Game Research Society
(ID: yysaag)
Friends familiar with PC hardware know that graphics cards have been quite difficult to purchase recently, with many older models even selling for higher prices than they did one or two years ago.
Especially AMD graphics cards, which have a relatively small production capacity, have found themselves in a situation where they are hard to come by.
Ordinary consumers are already struggling to buy RX470 and above models from AMD.
As for the second-hand graphics cards on platforms like Xianyu, the prices are astonishing; even the GTX970 graphics card released in 2014 is now selling for around 1500, truly a family heirloom card.
The shortage of these graphics cards is largely due to the continuous rise in the international market for virtual currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum over the past six months. Mid to high-end graphics cards have been swept away by “miners” for “mining”.
In simple terms, “mining” is the process where “miners” sell their computing power in exchange for rewards, and the value of the currency fluctuates based on market operations by large clients, making it a type of financial speculation.
Due to various market reasons, virtual currencies have become increasingly valuable, with the price of one Bitcoin rising from around $50 a few years ago to nearly $2700 today. The graphics cards that domestic miners are scrambling for are primarily used to mine the second largest virtual currency—Ethereum (ETH).
AMD graphics cards, known for their strong double-precision floating-point operations, support half of the mining of “Ethereum”.
The powerful floating-point computing capabilities of these graphics cards have made it easier for miners to mine, but many ordinary players are becoming restless. Many complain that the miners’ price inflation of graphics cards will eventually lead to a “mining disaster,” causing a significant crash in the graphics card market.
However, some miners may not care.
Not everyone needs hundreds of AMD graphics cards to support their mining operations; for some nostalgic geeks, using outdated equipment from ten or even decades ago can also allow them to join the mining craze.
For example, the well-known FC (Famicom) console.
The American version of the FC is called the NES, one of Nintendo’s most successful console products in the U.S., which has long been tinkered with by enthusiastic players. For instance, recently, two individuals modified their NES into a Netflix set-top box.
Enjoying popular American dramas on a 52-color screen
Meanwhile, a more ambitious individual, gbg (Twitter @__gbg__), has transformed his 1985 vintage NES into a mining machine.
If someone had mentioned “mining” on the NES a decade ago, they might have been referring to this:
The classic NES game “Lode Runner”
But gbg’s “mining” refers to mining Bitcoin.
Approximately every 10 minutes, a new data block is added to the world, and all mining devices attempt to compute and generate it, with the successful one receiving a reward of 25 Bitcoins.
However, only one lucky individual will receive the reward during that time. To reduce the risk of mining Bitcoin, a group of mining devices will combine their computing power in a “mining pool,” where everyone receives a “dividend” of the mined Bitcoin based on their contribution of computing power; those with higher computing power will receive more Bitcoin.
gbg’s plan is to transform his old NES into a money-making machine capable of completing the above process.
“Mining” is essentially about computation, computation, and more computation.
To others, gbg’s actions seem to be filled with a spirit of entertainment, with little practical significance.
Eight years after the birth of Bitcoin, “mining” has become a competition of computing power among large mining machine clusters, and has little to do with individual users. Even professional mining machines like Avalon require over a year of operation to earn about one Bitcoin.
Let alone the machine gbg is using, which exudes a strong sense of performance art.
But the affection for this old machine drives gbg to fulfill his great ambition.
In 2013, he created a website called “RetroMiner” while starting to modify this NES, documenting the process online.
The biggest challenge in transforming the NES into a mining machine is that the hashing algorithm for generating Bitcoin, “SHA-256,” produces 32-bit data, while the NES system is 8-bit.
To bridge this gap of the times, gbg purchased a Raspberry Pi single-board computer.
The Raspberry Pi is a Linux-based microcomputer, about the size of a credit card, primarily used for computer education and is inexpensive. Gbg uses this Raspberry Pi to fetch Bitcoin data from the internet and compiles it into a ROM using the SHA-256 algorithm, thus creating a “game file” that the NES can recognize.
With some additional small components, gbg can upload this file to the NES, allowing the 1985 machine to mine Bitcoin.
“RetroMiner,” the name gbg gave to his “mining game”.
For four years, this machine has been working day and night, and gbg hopes it can complete a successful computation and earn back one Bitcoin.
However, with the rising popularity of Bitcoin, there are now tens of thousands of mining machines (many of which are likely the various graphics cards that PC gamers have been longing for) operating frantically around the globe, competing with this small NES for a share of the 25 Bitcoins available every 10 minutes.
With the NES’s limited computing power, no one really expects it to earn even a small dividend.
Guizhou, a mining farm filled with mining machines. To reduce electricity and labor costs, many domestic mining farms are located in remote mountainous areas.
Gbg remains highly optimistic about this.
To monitor the mining situation, he even wrote a small program for the NES, so that when a computation is successful, the screen connected to the NES would turn green (of course, if the computation fails, the screen remains red).
The device monitoring the “mining situation” is a PS3 eye camera, to which gbg has added a visual recognition software. Once the screen flashes green, indicating a successful “mine,” the camera will react and send a notification over the internet to announce to the world:
I did it!
The complete NES mining machine system
Unfortunately, gbg’s inner monologue may be a bit excessive.
In English, there is a term called Rube Goldberg machine, referring to machines that are deliberately over-engineered. These machines typically execute very complex processes to accomplish very simple tasks.
In the words of Wang Xiaobo, it is like “a mountain giving birth, the sky collapses, the earth cracks… and in the end, a mouse is born.”
A typical Goldberg machine: How many steps does it take to kill a rabbit?
And gbg hasn’t even caught a single mouse.
This complex and intricate retro mining machine has been operating for a full four years, yet it hasn’t managed to mine even 1 Satoshi (the smallest unit of Bitcoin, equivalent to 0.00000001).
Gbg is also quite saddened. He said, “With the capabilities of the NES, the possibility of mining is too small. Really too small, very, very small (So small. So very, very small.)”
This sentiment resonates with many Bitcoin enthusiasts.
With the rising Bitcoin market and the centralization of mining machines, Bitcoin production has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of large mining farm owners.
What was once touted as “decentralized” Bitcoin has now become unprecedentedly centralized in terms of computing power. Even if many individual users are not using as bizarre a mining machine as the NES, the days when one could mine a Bitcoin with just a few PCs over several weeks are long gone.
Faced with this grim situation, gbg has not been discouraged. Although the NES cannot mine, he has not stopped researching Bitcoin on a technical level.
As a seasoned programmer, gbg has not only successfully reverse-engineered the Bitcoin wallet Trezor but has also created a hardware version of a Bitcoin wallet based on Trezor, naming it “Dinosaur Hiphop“ (恐龙嘻哈).
GBG’s self-developed Bitcoin hardware wallet
GBG has occasionally considered switching to a “newer” gaming console to complete his unfinished business, such as the Sega Dreamcast, which is significantly more powerful than the NES… I guess he is serious.
However, he also mentioned that he currently doesn’t have time to work on a new gaming console mining plan and can only temporarily set his plans aside.
Although I believe that with the fierce competition in the mining hardware industry today, gbg might need to switch to an Xbox One X by the end of the year to have a chance. Hopefully, one day, he can really mine with a gaming console.
▲ This article only represents the author’s views and does not reflect the position of this publication
END
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