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NASA’s Apollo Computer Mined Bitcoin in 2019 But Today It Would Take Forever
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The computer that guided Apollo astronauts to the moon once ran Bitcoin’s mining math, and a viral clip of the stunt is lighting up crypto timelines again this week.
Key facts
- Bitcoin surged past $81,000 on Friday, hitting an intraday high of $81,238, before settling around $80,800 with a $1.62 trillion…
- In 2019, the bitcoin network was running at about 65 exahashes per second (EH/s), or 65 quintillion hashes every second
- At that difficulty, Shirriff calculated the AGC would need about 4×10^23 seconds on average to find a block
- The network has grown a lot since then, and bitcoin’s hashrate sat at 934 EH/s after the Sept. 5 difficulty adjustment, which pushed mining difficulty 1.31% higher to 127.45 trillion
Summary
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. Crypto media outlets circulated the story again earlier today, explaining that computer scientist Ken Shirriff could program an Apollo Guidance machine to mine Bitcoin.