Can a Fruit Fly Brain Mine Bitcoin? These Companies Are Testing It
Summary
FutureBit tested HashFly, a browser-based Bitcoin mining demo that simulates activity in 2,914 neural pathways from a digital map of a fruit fly brain. The company says it is working toward simulating all neurons in the dataset and plans to publish results. It claims that, if real organic neurons could mine SHA-256 the same way, they might achieve about 1 watt per terahash—roughly 10x better than top 3nm ASIC miners—but this is only a hypothetical estimate based on the fly’s power use. The current system runs on normal computer hardware and is far too slow and low-difficulty to compete with real Bitcoin mining. A related project, FlyMiner, uses a much larger fly-brain model to drive a standard mining program.
