Fruit flies, Game Boys, and bathhouses walk into a Bitcoin block 🍉

A simulated fruit fly brain has been used to run Bitcoin mining calculations in a web browser, hardware maker FutureBit said in a Sept. 13 post on X, introducing a demonstration called HashFly. The experiment models activity across 2,914 neural pathways taken from MaleCNS v1.0, a digital wiring diagram of an adult male fruit fly's brain and central nerve cord, and the company said it is working to simulate all the neurons in the dataset with SHA-256, the hashing algorithm used to secure the $BTC network.

FutureBit estimated that a mining system built from living neurons could perform about one trillion calculations per second while consuming roughly one watt of electricity, which it described as "10x the efficiency of the best silicon 3nm ASICs." "Fun fact if this could be scaled on real organic neurons, it would hash at ~ 1 watt per terahash…10x the efficiency of the best silicon 3nm ASICs!" the company wrote. The projection applies a fruit fly's total power consumption to a hypothetical setup in which every neuron continuously mines Bitcoin.

Although the project is inspired by biological neurons, HashFly runs on conventional computer hardware and cannot compete with industrial miners. Bitcoin mining rewards participants who repeatedly run SHA-256 calculations, with hash rate measuring attempts per second, and HashFly lets users adjust the target while operating at a fraction of Bitcoin's current mining difficulty. FutureBit said its five-inch Apollo III ASIC miner reaches 18 terahashes per second.

A separate effort, FlyMiner, uses a digital map of 139,255 fruit fly neurons and 16.8 million connections to drive a standard Bitcoin mining program. When simulated signals from the fly's movement-control neurons cross a set threshold, the program tests possible solutions to a mining problem supplied by solo mining pool CKPool, reaching speeds of up to 700,000 attempts per second.

The fruit fly projects join a string of unconventional Bitcoin mining experiments, including an IT security researcher's March 2021 conversion of a 1989 Nintendo Game Boy into a miner producing about 0.8 hashes per second. A Brooklyn bathhouse said in June 2023 that it was routing heat from mining equipment into its pools, and Utah-based Nodal Power raised $13 million in August 2023 to expand facilities that generate electricity from landfill methane and use some of that power to mine Bitcoin.