🎃 VINTAGE HASH

About the project

Vintage Hash is a live solo-mining stream. The hardware on camera is real: Bitcoin miners from 2013 to 2015, the first generation of ASICs, restored and running again. Each one is pointed at my own Bitcoin node and solo-mining pool at home. No big farm, no shared pool, no fees. Just old silicon, doing the one thing it was built for, on the off chance it finds a block.

Every few months I'll swap out the hardware for something new, a different machine, a different piece of the early mining story, so there's always something new to see running. Some of these I have a few of; others are one-offs I've tracked down.

Nothing goes on the stream until it's been brought back properly: stripped down, years of dust and dirt cleaned out, fresh thermal paste and pads, and repairs where needed, like new fans. The machine you're watching has been through all of that, which is why it's still running at all.

Everything here is live and verifiable. The hashrate, the shares, the temperatures are all pulled straight from the miner as it runs. The mining address is on screen; click it and watch it on the blockchain yourself. If one of these machines ever finds a block, you'll see it here first, and you'll be able to check it in the mempool a second later.

Why

I got into Bitcoin mining in the Butterfly Labs era, back when the first ASICs were landing and nobody quite knew what they were doing. I put my early coins into a Black Arrow Prospero, a machine that turned out to be a long, expensive lesson. I got disillusioned and walked away for years.

The Bitaxe generation pulled me back: open hardware that actually works, that you can tinker with and understand. And it got me thinking: would the hardware from that earlier generation still work today? Could those old machines, the Butterfly Labs units, the Block Erupters, the Gridseeds, still be brought back to life? And if they could run, could they still mine?

Turns out they can. So I track them down, restore them, and put them back to work. The odds of a single vintage miner finding a block are absurd: millions of years, on paper. But someone, somewhere, eventually gets lucky. These machines were built to chase exactly this, and I like the idea of letting them keep trying, on camera, out loud, for as long as they'll run. Donations cover the electricity. The rest is just for the love of it.

There's one more thing, and it's the real reason. These machines were built for one job: to hash, to search for a block. That's their whole purpose. The world called them obsolete the moment faster hardware came along, but obsolete just means they can't compete, not that they're broken. The chip still does exactly what it was made to do. So when one of these old machines is cleaned up and plugged back in, it isn't struggling on past its time. It's doing the one thing it was built for, the same as the day it shipped. The odds don't matter to it. It just keeps searching, because that's what it is. I like giving them that back.

Gareth · with Missy the Mining Cat 🐾