Cryptocurrency mining is nowadays a largely demystified process. However, the hunt to find easy, profitable ways to mine is still on. Crypto farms with the power usage of a small city are not everyone’s endeavor and most likely not legal where you live, so the temptation of mining with accessible yet advanced devices like next-gen gaming consoles is high.
With old consoles making the news as mining rigs you could leave on when not playing and earn crypto, doing the same with the much more advanced and promising PS5 everyone thought was bound to happen. After years of failed hacking attempts, a source from China claiming they did precisely that at a staggering hash rate sparked the curiosity of millions.
Besides saving you time clarifying the validity of the news on what you can and cannot do with the PS5 today, we will share through this article the proven ways in which companies and individuals are experimenting with the concept and if it’s at all worth it compared to other mining alternatives.
How Does Console Mining Work?
YouTuber Stackshmaning showed in a video how he turned his 32 years old GameBoy into a bitcoin mining rig. Using an external USB, a Raspberry Pi Pico, and some software trickery, he demonstrated that almost anything can be used to mine if you’re dedicated enough. However, It surely won’t make him back even the cost of the triple-A batteries powering the Nintendo; in fact, it would take a trillion years to produce a single Bitcoin!
Advanced consoles are much faster, but with speed come restrictions. The last decade where everything with a good GPU was snatched from the shelves by cryptominers, taught console companies that letting people mine is not the best business choice. The PS5 and Xbox X series GPUs promise to be profitable home-friendly mining rigs with their advanced hardware but require much more sophisticated software and hardware trickery than a Gameboy.
Unfortunately, there has yet to be any officially proven method to directly mine from any next-gen console as none support necessary third-party mining software. It is theoretically possible to install Linux on a PS4, but you would need to then develop your own mining software and find a way to connect it to a PC if needed. The rumor of a Chinese hacker mining ETH with a PS5 at staggering 99 MH/s mentioned in the beginning did not come to anything, and even the news of a giant PS4 mining farm in Ukraine was later proven to be ”mining” Fifa Ultimate Team bots.
No need to despair just yet, as crypto miners are famous for not giving up.
There’s Not One Way of Mining With a Console
It’s advertised as a “12 x AMD BC-250 mining APU passive design with 16GB of GDDR6 RAM and two 1200W power supplies.” It all matches Sony’s PS5 specs, and even though it’s expensive, around $15k, it costs less than purchasing 12 separate PS5s and putting them together with this efficiency. To put things into perspective on how powerful that is, one such assembly is as strong as a modern-day server that would run a more demanding service that’s constantly being pinged by users and asked for information that needs to be overturned x number of times in one second. When it comes to cryptocurrency, a perfect example of that would be running a crypto-based casino and its complex back-end with a vast software portfolio to play with, from different slots to bitcoin live baccarat games. And although the minimum specs for running such a thing would start off with something like four lower-clocked cores and 16 GB of RAM, the reality is that you’ll quickly need to stack those machines as soon as you get a bit more of a heavy load on it, e.g., more and more new and co-currents players.
But, when it comes to mining using the above example, this method is ធ្វើតេស្ត and certified, leaving space for future safe bets on using consoles to mine, or at least their parts.
What’s Great and Not So Great About PS5 Mining
To put it into perspective, we should go slightly into the hardware side.
Is It Worth It in the Long Run, and What Are the Alternatives?
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2023/02/01/can-the-ps5-be-used-as-a-mining-rig/