As Bitcoin miners turn to increasingly specialized chips for greater speed and energy efficiency, hardware maker FutureBit says it has tested a different approach: using a simulated fruit fly brain to perform mining calculations in a web browser.

The HashFly demonstration simulates activity across 2,914 neural pathways taken from MaleCNS v1.0, a digital wiring diagram of an adult male fruit fly’s brain and central nerve cord.

FutureBit said on X that the company is working to simulate all the neurons in the dataset with SHA-256 and plans to publish its findings.

“Fun fact if this could be scaled on real organic neurons, it would hash at ~ 1 watt per terahash…10x the efficiency of the best silicon 3nm ASICs!” the company wrote.

This means that a mining system made with living neurons could perform one trillion calculations per second while consuming about one watt of electricity—roughly 10 times the efficiency of leading 3-nanometer ASIC miners. The estimate applies a fruit fly’s total power consumption to a hypothetical system in which every neuron mines Bitcoin continuously.

While inspired by biological neurons, the experiment runs on conventional computer hardware and lacks the hash rate and difficulty required to compete with Bitcoin miners.

Bitcoin miners compete to add transaction blocks by repeatedly running SHA-256 calculations, with hash rate measuring the number of attempts per second. HashFly lets users adjust the target but operates at a fraction of Bitcoin’s current mining difficulty; by comparison, FutureBit says its five-inch Apollo III ASIC miner reaches 18 terahashes per second.

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A separate project called FlyMiner uses a digital map of 139,255 fruit fly neurons and 16.8 million connections to control a standard Bitcoin mining program. When simulated signals from the fly’s movement-control neurons reach a set threshold, the program tests possible solutions to a mining problem supplied by solo mining pool CKPool, at speeds of up to 700,000 attempts per second.

The fruit fly projects are the latest in a series of unconventional Bitcoin mining experiments.

In March 2021, an IT security researcher converted a 1989 Nintendo Game Boy into a miner that produced about 0.8 hashes per second. A Brooklyn bathhouse said in June 2023 that it was routing heat from mining equipment into its pools, while Utah-based Nodal Power raised $13 million in August 2023 to expand facilities that generate electricity from landfill methane and use some of that power to mine Bitcoin.