The post NASA’s Apollo Computer Mined Bitcoin in 2019 But Today It Would Take Forever appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
Key Takeaways Ken Shirriff’s team got an Apollo Guidance Computer to run one bitcoin hash every 10.3 seconds in 2019. Bitcoin’s hashrate reached 934 EH/s in September 2026, about 14 times the 65 EH/s the team faced. At today’s hashrate the machine would need about 13 million times the age of the universe to find a block. The Clip That Came Back Crypto media outlets circulated the story again earlier today, explaining that computer scientist Ken Shirriff was able to program an Apollo Guidance machine to mine Bitcoin. Shirriff first published the project on his blog in July 2019, drawing coverage from several popular media houses at the time. The reason the story continues to pique the interest of crypto enthusiasts is simple, i.e. it sets one of the most famous computers in history against the most powerful computing network on Earth, and the gap between them explains proof-of-work, bitcoin’s mining system, better than any diagram. The Machine on the Bench The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) handled navigation and engine control on the Apollo missions. According to Shirriff, it weighs about 70 pounds, has 2K words of RAM (roughly 4 kilobytes), 36K words of read-only memory, and can perform about 40,000 additions per second. This particular unit never went to space but Shirriff believes it was installed in LTA-8, a lunar module test article, and its private owner picked it up at a scrapyard in the 1970s after NASA discarded it. Shirriff restored it with Mike Stewart, Carl Claunch and Marc Verdiell, the engineer behind the Curiousmarc Youtube channel. How Slow Is 10.3 Seconds? Shirriff wrote the mining code in AGC assembly language. The computer needed 5.15 seconds to compute a single SHA-256 hash, the cryptographic function bitcoin uses. Because BTC mining hashes each block header twice, that works out…