Apollo Guidance Computer Crushed by Today's Bitcoin Mining Power
A team of computer scientists led by Ken Shirriff successfully programmed an Apollo Guidance Computer to mine Bitcoin in 2019. The AGC, which weighed around 70 pounds and had a mere 2K words of RAM, was able to compute one Bitcoin hash every 10.3 seconds.
At the time, the Bitcoin network's hashrate was approximately 65 exahashes per second (EH/s), or 65 quintillion hashes every second. Shirriff calculated that the AGC would need about a million times the age of the universe to find a block at this difficulty level.
Fast forward to today, and the Bitcoin network's hashrate has grown significantly, reaching 934 EH/s in September 2026. This means that the AGC would now require approximately 13 million times the age of the universe to find a block.