Bitcoin miners have tried everything, now they're trying fly brains

A Bitcoin mining hardware maker is testing something unusual: instead of silicon, it's running a simulated insect brain.

FutureBit, which builds the HashFly and Apollo III ASIC miners, built HashFly as a browser demo that turns a fruit fly's brain into mining hardware.

It runs on 2,914 neural traces pulled from a full map of a male fruit fly's brain and nervous system, containing a total of 165,122 reconstructed neurons.

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In the demo, simulated photoreceptors "read" the Bitcoin block header, and two neurons called PPL101 cells flash when a SHA-256d hash falls under a toy target, a simplified stand-in for Bitcoin's real mining difficulty.

"Fun fact if this could be scaled on real organic neurons, it would hash at ~1 watt per terahash...10x the efficiency," FutureBit said in a post on X, comparing the theoretical setup to the best silicon 3-nanometer ASICs on the market.

How the fly-brain miner actually works

A separate project called FlyMiner takes this even further. It maps out 139,255 fruit fly neurons and 16.8 million connections between them, and uses that to control a regular Bitcoin miner.

Whenever the simulated brain activity hits a certain threshold, it triggers a mining attempt, capping out at about 700,000 tries per second. CKPool, a solo mining pool, supplies the mining problems it works on.