Bitcoin Forum

So in the name of just using every possible resource for mining I thought...why not your Android phone?

Obviously, it should only run while sitting on the charger and at a nearly full charge because it would just absolutely suck your battery dry in less than 2 hours, but if you're at home, your phone is living on the charger anyways, just sitting idle!

The other caveat is that it is going to have horrible performance.  My 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Quad CPU only performs about 1.6 MH/s per core.  So my Droid's 550 Mhz CPU will probably only perform about 0.35 MH/s at a MAXIMUM.

Is it worth it at all?  Would anybody be interested in this?

EDIT: I didn't mention it specifically, but I'm a newbie Java/Android developer, but have some experience with C/C++ so I'm learning the language quickly.  If there's sufficient interest (And perhaps someone paying me), I will develop this.

Nope, I won't do this.
It'll probably might break up my phone way before it mined a share :o

Check out 'ARM' section of this site, Motorola devices for example are running on ARM processors (as are many others)

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison

there is limited stats there but Nokia N900  running on ARM for example is getting less than 0.36 Mhash per Joule, which is not at all efficient, let alone cost effective (yes, I know, it's not android).

I don't think it would be worth it because even if your phone is on the charger it might drastically affect it's battery life.

(Not sure - Does the battery form part of the circuit at all when the charger is plugged in, or is it completely bypassed?)

Once the battery is charged, it just stops charging and any power usage will come from the battery.  It'll recharge again after it drops a bit.  Somewhere a graph where someone showed the power usage of his charger over time.  Once it was fully charged, the charger stopped using power for like 30 minutes, then came back on for a minute to top the battery off again.

Yeah so that would seriously cut short your battery life.

Speaking of mining on an N900,can somebody please provide me a download link to the mining program for the N900 phone along with setup instructions please as I really want to gte it started asap now for my experiments.Even if it's CPU only,I want the link to it.While I'm on the subject can someone please build a GPU miner on that phone and also an overclocking tool for N900s GPU.Thinsg for people to know:I know that overclocking is risky to the N900,I know that mining is probably worthless on N900.All I care about is that I can carry out my experiments involving multiple devices form multiple platforms in addition to my 2 computers.

Thank you

I think you'd be better off pawning your phone and buying another video card.

Hope you are joking right ? I don't even dare OC my laptop and you want to OC a phone GPU lol good luck !

Yeah I don't think such a miner would work on a telephone  ::) ::)

I've OCed every android phone I've owned for development and quadrant testing, never any problems. Battery life is key in development of new phones, so they are essentially extremely underclocked from the factory. Bumping .2-.4 GHz typically will not damage a phone, but they do get hot with a battery sitting on them.

Edit: I'm not saying you should mine on your phone though. You will seriously depreciate the life expectancy of your device! You may get 2 months out of your phone. It's designed to be small and portable, not for constant use and heat dissipation.

Actually develoment of native and optimised ARM miner is a must for various reasons.

1) Raspberry PI at $25
2) Rhombus-Tech will be offering a AllWinner A10 board for $15 (easily twice as fast as Raspberry)
3) Mali is already supporting Directx11, OpenCL and DC on its new gpus for mobile cpus.

This.

Has anyone tried this with some stats to tell us? I think it might take some years to get anything from it.

the test with arm hardware was based on a cross-compiles cpuminer, is not optimised for arm.

dude, its not even worth it. come on how crazy can you get?

While it might not be worth doing it on the CPU of the phone I would be really curious of benchmarks on a typical Android GPU.
They are powerful for being integrated in a phone, and their power usage is low probably.

I'm close to buying an Rpi (they are about 45mins away from me) and I have a ZTE blade running cyanogenmod. I'm thinking of doing this, particularly as there has been an opensource gpu driver release for certain Mali cores, and so there could be opencl capable systems.

Just need to find out further what the blade and rpi gpu cores are based on. I think the blade is an adreno200. Also it might be worth it just to get a miner running, and see what a bramble can do (multiple rpi's in a cluster).

If I could get 10btc together I would definitely do it. Anybody interested?


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Dont think this would be good, maybe for litecoin.

Added some emphasis for you.

Maybe look at litecoin, but I think you are wasting your time.

Anyone know of just an arm mining app? Maybeh the arm a8 that the beagle
Bone has it would be interesting to see a machine code miner just to get some extra cpu cycles in there.

There's a Litecoin mining app for the android (search for "andltc miner"), which according to pooler is a port of the java miner to dalvik.

Don't think there's a miner for bitcoin for android yet, nor one that works on the GPUs.

Also there's this CuBox : http://www.solid-run.com/

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I already have a hard time getting my Android phone through a whole day. Can't imagine battery life with a mining app! :)

I ported cpuminer to Android over the weekend, mostly as an exercise for learning Android development. 

I haven't fully worked out a UI solution.  Currently you can only view the status output through the debug console.  Having issues with Java callbacks from a native environment.

Perhaps when I get it a bit more polished I'll share if anyone is interested.

Of course it would be impractical to actually mine with it.  Although you never know, perhaps one day someone in some remote village with a solar powered phone, will download an app and run it for an hour or so to earn a few satoshis with which to play.  I'd like to integrate p2ppool and a wallet to make it an easy one-click solution.  Also sooner or later Android is bound to support openCL.

would this work on a quad core Android ?

I would think so, as long as it as an ARM CPU.  And you can manually configure the number of threads to take advantage of multiple cores.

i me minig @

http://bitclockers.com/userbar/910b48e74cb1b731c0ff67e204c7a858 (http://bitclockers.com)

use GPU and some old computer

I'm developing an Android Bitcoin miner that i'll be uploading soon, currently it does around 450khash/s per core on my Galaxy S2, i optimized it a lot as it was giving about 230khash/s using the original cpuminer 'c' algo. I'm looking to optimize it to give at least 500khash/s per core, so i can get 1mh/s on my phone. Yes, all of this is just for fun, not profitable at all. I will let you know when it is ready  :)

Sounds nice.  Mine was not optimized at all. 

I'm curious to see the code.  Mostly wondering how you solved the problem I was encountering, updating the UI from native threads.

An android miner would actually be a cool but very wasteful way to pay for android software.
Want to play a puzzle? pay by mining in the backgound!
and that would be a sure way for your app to be thrown out of the android market / google play.

But nice thinking ^^

Edit: Please release your code !!

an arm core optimised release would be useful in other areas as well, so please include source in any release.

Though for 1Mhs you might as well put it on glbse.com in one of the 1Mhs/share mining co.s and have a responsive phone :-)

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As long as your phone is plugged into someone else's power.  (at work, maybe?)

Remember that there is OpenCL supporting gpus already avalibe for ARM cpus...

ARM Gpus from 2012 onward are going to Support full OpenCL, Directx 11, OpenGL 4.0, OpenGL ES 2.0 and some even Directx 9.

Last I checked there was no API yet though, at least not for Android.

Bitcoin on ARM suggests that, like other forms of BTC mining, it works best if you simply ignore the math. For example, there's a post here somewhere where someone estimates their payback period on FPGA hardware to be 2 years. Two years to break even on something that will have no resale value in six months? True Believers have to be lining up left and right for a deal like that.

Even if you could do this, you would make so little ... a couple pennies a day or something.

You won't make any money. In fact, you will lose it.  There is no way a phone will ever make more in coin than the cost of electricity.

Cost of a battery to the amount of bitcoins you generate will not be worth it :\
That alongside the possibility of your phone pretty much dying..haha

Lol everyone keeps mentioning phones that would be pointless for sure. Beaglebone (maybe beagleboard might be better) on the other hand might go faster with a mini lunux version no gui, nothing to compute besides btc transactions.

I want to try on my galaxy s2

I would like to try it as well. Plus I have a wattmeter, so I will try to do some empirical measurements of the cost-benefits.

kr105, would love to try your android miner.  ;D

I'm pretty sure it won't be cost effective  :-[

The only benefit of this would be possible further exposure of bitcoins

Well... Since kr105 says that he has one in development, might as well try it right? Otherwise all those man-hours of development would be for naught.

I do not think this would be profitable, and it may damage your phone, as phones are not designed to operate at that intensity.

Basically, this project would be interesting only, as an experiment, and spreading the news about the bitcoin (as someone mentioned above).

Well of course :)

Not a good idea to mine on a phone.
I have the n900 running a very old version of bitcoind, it is very difficult to get to compile bitcoind in arm hardware.
One good thing about software running on n900 is that it will also run on the guruplug, and the openmoko, but none of this platforms are good for mining, might be good for a mining pool where the shares are done by other computers in the case of the guruplug.
In the case of the n900 just by running the bitcoind daemon, the phone gets very hot and drains the battery very quickly, that is running the daemon without any mining gets the phone very hot.
The only reason the daemon was run, was to use the phone as a portable wallet, but it was not a good idea, since it is exactly the same command line daemon that you have on a pc, but on the phone cut and paste from the command line or to the command line can no be done, and typing the bitcoin address with a stylus or keyboard is difficult but not imposible, good for emergencies however.
Also the phone can barely run bitcoind, it lacks resources to run bitcoind properly.

Well today you have phones that can solar charge themself ;)

Did he release the apk for the Galaxy S II yet?  Im dying.. I know its not profitable but what a conversation piece!!

Yeah, the only benefit of doing this I could think of would be as a conversation peice. I mean, you may be able to get say, 500 KHashes/sec(and that's being extremely optimistic- the mining hardware page says only about 200 is to be expected), but still, that's unbelievably slow all things considered. But hey, I'm not going to stop you. It'd be entertaining in the sense of a 'screw it, we're doing this' sense.

I want to mine litecoins on my nook just for the fuck of it

I found a nice bitcoin miner for android with UI app on playstore, the name is CGDROID, some screens
This tool support SSL connections and threaded CPU mode, the cost is low and this very nice..

http://forum.xda-developers.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=1597217&d=1356664050 http://forum.xda-developers.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=1597216&d=1356664050 http://forum.xda-developers.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=1597218&d=1356664050

Looks good!  ;)
maybe I'm gonna try it.

Doesn't BFL have an android miner now?

Not wanna hijack this thread,
but does anybody know the hashrates for whatever crypto-currency of the Raspberries or the AllWinner A10 board?
Wanna know it since a few days but can´t really find something...
THX!

cgdroid says it requires root access.  I'll give it a shot if I end up rooting my phone (which I might end up doing if my carrier doesnt update my HTC one x to jellybean soon.)

I'm sure this has been stated before, but you're killing the phone and the battery quickly when you mine on it...

I can't get cgdroid to connect to btcguild server. I get the invalid username and password data error.

Interesting concept... then again it usually always was easier to buy low sell high than it was to work for the currency itself : P

There are Android devices with OpenCL support right now...

Why would this be?
My android phones run fine when theyre plugged without a battery in at all.  So it doesnt make sense that theyed use battery while plugged in. 

Scary... but heck, I'd make my phone help out if I find a good app!  CGDROID looks totally cool.

You'd definitely have to be REALLY LUCKY if you ever mine any coins on a phone. ;)

I just tried LTCMiner (CGDROID requires 4.0.3+) on my 600 MHz phone and got, on average, *5* hashes per second :D

I thought about mining on my laptop when I'm in a hotel and decided that it's not worth it. Still way to slow.

Interesting, but still too slow to bother mining on phone :(

Maybe only with the OpenCL capable ones...

I tried the LTC miner but my Mesmerize was too slow to even get a share before the next block came out and it had to start over again.

I know everyone says its not worth it on your phone but what about these android PCs they sell now? Still not worth it?

http://www.amazon.com/MK808-Android-Rockchip-RK3066-Cortex-A9/dp/B009OX22B4/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&qid=1362895691&sr=8-8&keywords=android+pc

I saw that, I even tried to compile kernel for android - rk3066, but it still be times slower than average GPU (mine now HD7850@1120MHz - 228Mhash/s) and orders of magnitude slower than ASIC rigs - (butterfly labs etc. - but no experience here).