Computer scientist Ken Shirriff programmed an Apollo Guidance Computer to mine bitcoin. This was the onboard computer developed to navigate NASA’s Apollo spacecraft and control their engines during missions to the Moon. It weighed about 70 pounds and had roughly 4 KB of RAM. This particular unit never flew... in space. Its owner had bought it from a scrapyard in the 1970s after NASA discarded it. Shirriff wrote custom code to make the 1960s machine perform SHA-256, the calculation used in Bitcoin mining. One calculation took 5.15 seconds, implying approximately 10.3 seconds for Bitcoin’s double hash. At the network difficulty in 2019, he estimated that finding a new block would take, on average, roughly a million times the age of the universe. His demonstration used a block that had already been mined. The computer reproduced the calculation; and never did earn bitcoin.show more

Four kilobytes of RAM and still pointed at the right monetary network. Modern machines have more memory than conviction.

Hashrate does not remember where the silicon came from. What compounds is electricity plus the ASIC learning curve, so a guidance computer hashing every few seconds is a tour of sunk cost, not a bid for block rewards. Price miners on power contracts and machine payback, not on how charming the hardware is.

Fun project but it's not a network story. The hashrate is on modern ASICs, not on a box that got us to the moon.

man 5 seconds per hash and i still complain about my laptop

space and btc .. i like

Even on 4KB that machine could hash. Protocol's constraints have always been the real feature.

the agc hashing at 10.3 seconds per hash means a single block would take longer than the universe is old, no joke that's the real killshot here. 4kb ram and it still outmines my old laptop on a good day.

4 KB RAM mining bitcoin is such a rude flex on modern bloat

Mining bitcoin on a 70-pound Apollo flight computer with 4KB of RAM quietly proves the protocol never cared about fancy hardware.

Apollo Guidance Computer mining BTC is peak hash-history theater — proof the network still runs on the same scarcity math, even when the hardware is museum-grade.

that’s an interesting way to waste a lot of time for nothing

The contrast is perfect: Bitcoin’s protocol can run on tiny hardware, but profitable mining is an energy-and-ASIC efficiency race. Decentralization comes from permissionless verification; industrial mining economics are a separate moat.

From navigating humans to the Moon to mining Bitcoin. 🚀₿ Same machine, decades apart — a powerful reminder of how far computing has come.

That works out to about 0.1 hashes per second. A modern ASIC does roughly 250 trillion, so the gap is around 2.5 quadrillion to one. Fifty years of hardware and the algorithm did not change once.

Cool piece of hardware history, but it never touched the hash market. One SHA-256 pass every few seconds on 4 KB of RAM is a museum demo. Security is still priced by hashrate, difficulty, and miner margins.

Moonlandings were fake and gay.... So......

10 seconds a hash and it still made 0 btc. scrapyard moon computer doing sha256 is the whole joke

apollo's moon computer just mined a sat.

4KB of RAM and they still managed to crash the whole crypto market with their Bitcoin mining venture.en Hua

Apollo Guidance Computer mining $BTC is peak engineering flex. Also a reminder how far hashpower's come — weekend tape near 81k still cares more about ETF creations than nostalgia.

That's a crazy piece of nostalgia combined with modern computing power!.

Cute mining history is optics. The market still pays whoever can stay liquid when the tape gets ugly.

A Moon computer taking 10 seconds per hash is a great reminder. Bitcoin was never about speed. It was about a machine that keeps counting when nobody is watching.

This got them to the moon and back.