Mining on the phone: is it realistic to mine cryptocurrency this way

Here’s what you can do if you try to earn bitcoin on your smartphone

Usually, when it comes to mining equipment, they mean incredibly powerful computers worth several thousand dollars. But it is possible to mine cryptocurrency even on a smartphone. In this article we will tell you how to mine on your phone, and whether you should do it at all.

Let’s note right away that officially neither Google nor Apple allow mining cryptocurrency on their smartphones or (in the case of Google) on devices that run on the Android OS.

Why Apple and Google oppose mining

Apple and Google introduced a ban on mining on phones in 2018 a month apart – Apple in June and Google in August. This was due not only to the potential damage that mining apps can do to a device, but also to the large number of malicious apps that masqueraded as mining apps.

For example, AppStore rules explicitly state that apps must not “rapidly drain the battery, excessively overheat the device, or place an unnecessary burden on the device’s resources.

At the same time, both companies note that cryptocurrency mining is allowed if the process takes place not on the device, but outside of it – that is, in the cloud. For example, in Google Play, you can find applications like MinerGate Control, which allows you to monitor the mining process.

In the case of Android, you can try to search for a mining program on your phone on the Internet and then download it bypassing the app store, but there is a high probability that you will just install malicious software for yourself.

Moreover, there is a chance that after installing such an app, hackers will use the power of your phone networked with other phones to mine cryptocurrency “at your expense.”

Be careful, you can come across malware pretending to be a cloud-based cryptocurrency mining app on your phone, even in official app stores.

For example, according to Trend Micro, they found several apps on Google Play that masqueraded as apps for cloud mining on your phone. In fact, the malware offered to pay for higher mining speeds, which, of course, the user did not receive.

But even if phone mining apps weren’t banned, it’s unlikely they would make much sense now.

Smartphone for mining

In the fall of 2019, HTC introduced the Exodus 1S “crypto smartphone,” which was essentially a cryptocurrency wallet that allows you to store virtual currency on your device.

In the spring of 2020, it was announced that the Exodus 1S would have its own app for mining Monero cryptocurrency. That would be fine, but as journalists then calculated, to mine $1 worth of cryptocurrency to the device will take a year, and to recover the value of the device (about $700) – 500 years.

Of course, it may be noted here that the Exodus 1S did not have any outstanding technical characteristics. But even smartphones on one of the most powerful mobile processors at the moment Snapdragon 888 will be many times inferior in performance even not the most top-of-the-line computers.

Is it worth mining on your phone

It is important to remember that the whole point of mining is to solve a complex mathematical problem and get a reward in the form of cryptocurrency.

The more resources your device consumes to solve the problem, the bigger the reward will be if the problem is solved. Considering that even the most powerful smartphone has incommensurably less power than a top-of-the-line PC, your reward for solving the problem will be much, much less anyway.

“Mining on phones is a game for fools. It goes against everything we know about economies of scale, and is more likely to give the user false hope than to help them.

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