Google's simulated fruit fly brain 'mines Bitcoin' in web browser proof of concept — FutureBit says real organic neuron miner could have '10x the efficiency of the best silicon 3nm ASICs'

A project claimed to represent “the first organic neuron Bitcoin miner based on the fly brain” has gone live. Yes, this is a cryptomining project that leans on the fruit fly connectome recently shared by Google. FutureBit, the company behind the Apollo series of ASIC miners, introduced the world to its HashFly this week. However, HashFly is merely a proof of concept for now.

If you open the dedicated HashFly site, you can also participate in this agitation of fruit fly brains in the (vain) hope of a crypto payout. I clicked the 'Mine' button and left it running for an hour, for science, and periodically flipped back to the tab to see the gently rotating fly brain’s neuron traces firing. Looking at the website overlay, one can see the web app represents “2,914 traces firing” within the fly’s brain. It is worth mentioning that this figure is just a small subset of the full 165,122 reconstructed neurons in the MaleCNS v1.0 fruit fly connectome.

We understand that FutureBit’s HashFly focuses on the simulated photoreceptors that would usually sense light in the fly’s eye. These read a block header, and neurons called PPL101 cells light up when a double-SHA-256 target is computed. You can make the target harder and easier by adjusting the ‘zeros’ up and down. Even at maximum difficulty in this proof of concept (level 6), it is far, far easier than finding a real Bitcoin hash, and I saw about 80 blocks checked off in an hour or so.