If you were ever thinking about trying to get into the crypto craze by mining some of it yourself, please don’t begin by mining using your laptop. If you do, don’t expect to make any money from it.

One developer has done exactly the opposite and turned the Toshiba T3200SX from 1989 into a miner. This relic runs on an Intel 386SX processor with a clock speed of just 16Mhz and uses the MS-DOS OS. When it first came out you would have had to fork out the equivalent of close to R97,000 for it. And that was 30 years ago.

When Dmitrii Eliuseev set all this up he definitely wasn’t expecting to earn any money. In typical developer fashion, it was just to see if he could. Turns out he can.

It’s not about being right, it’s about sending a message

He wrote a blog post that you can read here. In it, he details how we went about this. What caught our eye was the hash rate and the resulting payout calculation. On this 33-year-old laptop, he could manage a hash rate of only 15H/s. That means the laptop could produce 15 guesses per second with that CPU and code.

To offer a bit of context, the most powerful bitcoin miner, the Antminer S19 Pro, has a hash rate of 110TH/s. That would be (we’ll use words because it’s a lot of zeros) ninety-five trillion guesses per second more than this laptop. Eliuseev’s code worked out that it would take you 584 million years to earn $1 in bitcoin.

So, if you’re thinking about mining on your own laptop, it’ll be a lot faster than this one but that doesn’t mean it’ll be profitable. Remember, you still have to pay for electricity. And your laptop probably won’t last too long before you start needing to replace parts, like the battery. Better to leave laptops for writing articles and watching Netflix in bed.