Bitcoin Mining using the MS-DOS laptop
Many devices can be used for Bitcoin mining, from ASIC or GPU cards to the Raspberry Pi. Why not try something really exotic? Like a 32-year-old laptop? Why? Because we can.
The best way to study any technology is to try it. I think readers can already guess that bitcoin mining on a 30-years-old PC will not make you rich. But it is a nice try to understand how it works “under the hood” and also to compare how the computer’s performance grew up during this time.
It has a 16 MHz 80386SX CPU and it was a cutting edge tech of its time. Can we mine Bitcoins on it? Let’s get started and figure it out.
First, let’s figure out in general, how bitcoin mining works. There are enough good articles explaining the details, I’ll only show the basic idea. There are two key components in every bitcoin transaction. First — the idea of the blockchain. Every transaction contains a hash number of the data combined with a previous transaction, thus if any byte in the chain will be changed, the checksum will be failed. The second component — every new transaction in a blockchain should have a double SHA256 hash that matches a specific condition of “difficulty”. And this is actually the “secret ingredient” of all Bitcoin operations — for every transaction, miners should find a proper value (it is called “nonce”), which makes the hash smaller than a specific value, determined by the system. This process may require millions of attempts, and the group of miners who have found and uploaded the proper value gets the award.
What are miners actually doing? First, the difficulty bits determine the minimum hash that will match the difficulty criteria. For our value 1903a30c, the hash threshold will be 00000000 00000003 a30c0000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000. Miners are trying to vary the “nonce” parameter until the double SHA256 value of the data block will be less than that criteria.
