As technology and the cryptocurrency industry progressed, new options became available for earning digital assets, including creating Bitcoin (BTC) by playing video games. A developer upgraded his old Nintendo console to create a decentralized finance (DeFi) asset while playing Super Mario.
Earn Bitcoin by playing games!
Specifically, Christian Moss, developer and co-founder of Zebedee (ZBD), a Bitcoin-powered platform that allows developers to deposit money into their games and gamers to earn money by playing games, upgraded his original Nintendo to do just that. He showed it in a video released on January 23.
With @zebedeeio you can put bitcoin into anything!
In preparation for @advbitcoin I wanted to see if I could add bitcoin into a Super Mario running on my original NES, every time you get a coin it sends you some sats! pic.twitter.com/KPIvO09oo7
— Christian Moss (@MandelDuck) January 23, 2023
how did it go
Moss plays Super Mario Bros. on the upgraded Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) via Zebedee. When he started playing 3, the game sent him 10 satoshis or “sats” (Bitcoin’s atomic unit) every time he threw a coin in the game, as evidenced.
Taking into account that 100 million satoshis equals one Bitcoin (10 sats = 0.0000001 BTC or $0.002299 at press time), this is slow though very fun to get a profitable amount of the first digital asset, especially when the game is there will be a way.
In the comments to the video, Moss gave a Bitcoin Gameboy game developer a hint on how to implement the system, emphasizing that if the game can make basic HTTP requests, then it would be easy to send sats with the Zebedee API.
The developer also promised to present his project at the Advancing Bitcoin conference, which will take place on March 2-3 in London, and will write a detailed tutorial for anyone who wants to replicate his experiment.
Similar efforts
Meanwhile, this isn’t the first time someone has activated a video game console to earn cryptocurrency. In late March 2021, we came across a pseudonymous vlogger who, after failing to find a suitable graphics processing unit (GPU) in stores, modified his Nintendo Game Boy to mine Bitcoin.
His solution was to connect the Game Boy to a computer using a Raspberry Pi Pico via the console’s port, which is normally used to handle Pokémon trading and other things. Raspberry Pi Pico allowed to create an adapter from a connecting cable to USB. However, the game console was able to pump only 0.8 hashes per second.
