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?
There are generally two main ways to mine crypto from home using hardware. You either build/buy a dedicated mining rig or use a computer with a powerful GPU or CPU. Consoles naturally fall into the second category, and even though they don’t match the effectiveness of big box ASICs, they are much easier to find. The biggest challenge with them, as with every non-exclusive mining device, is finding workarounds in making them mine in their ‘free’ time. The challenge is much more complicated than it sounds.
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
If there’s a GPU, there’s a way, or at least there should be one. If you’re wondering why we can’t just take PS5 parts and use them to mine, the answer is we can, but it’s not as easy as assembling a few parts together ourselves.
The Taiwanese industrial computer manufacturer ASRock launched this year a crypto mining server in collaboration with AMD that is apparently powered by twelve PS5 APUs. The first defective run of PS5s seems to have been put to good use with an average hash rate of 610 Mh/s when Mining Ethereum.
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 tested 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
All the fuss about mining with the PS5 must mean it is super efficient money-making machinery, right? Unfortunately, that’s not true even when taking market fluctuations out of the equation.
The main factors that make the PS5 attractive are availability and the desired passive income of using a console you already bought to play games to make extra income. Why not even test out with your console and the reasonable power bill you’d get for operating it 24/7 if mining is something you’d want before investing serious money?
Using it for the second reason makes more sense than the first, and there’s nothing against trying if a valid method comes up soon, assuming the PS5 cooling system is good enough to handle long hours. Repairing a faulty or burned-out console is likely to cost more than your crypto income, no matter how much effort you put into it.
To generate profit, however, the energy consumption and hash rate compared to more powerful already tested GPUs and dedicated rigs wouldn’t make it ideal. It is ‘safe’ as you will likely consume a few extra dollars of power, but you won’t earn much either.
To put it into perspective, we should go slightly into the hardware side.
The PS5 does not use a graphic card like the ones you are used to installing on a PC. By approximation, the most similar graphic unit would be the AMD RX 6900 XT graphics card which can mine Bitcoin at a maximum rate of 31.20 MH/s.
Assuming the PS5 mines at this rate, it won’t generate more than a few dollars per month, even in the best market conditions we have seen up until 2022.
Is It Worth It in the Long Run, and What Are the Alternatives?
So far, we have explained what we can control but did not pay much attention to the most critical factor – the crypto and tech ecosystem. Time is the most crucial factor in everything crypto, and whether we will see another ideal window to mine either with rigs or possibly consoles is debatable. There are surely ways to make a profit, but it’s harder than it used to be.
Just recently, Ethereum switched from a proof-of-work model to a proof-of-stake, meaning you cannot mine it anymore. At the time of writing, we are going through a long Bear market, and attention towards finding solutions to mine with consoles has shifted momentarily away, leaving space for other solutions.
Although we can’t point towards a verified way to mine using your PS5, other wiser choices are here. You can freely mine with a MacBook M1 and even look up arguably the safest option of all, Cloud Mining. As long as methods only a few clicks away exist, PS5 mining might not be worth your attention when the surely-to-come PS6 is here.
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Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2023/02/01/can-the-ps5-be-used-as-a-mining-rig/