Bitcoin Forum

Hi guys,

I'm in this cryptospace for two years now (jumped in at the '17-'18 hype), and I'm at the point where I want to experiment with mining a little bit.

I have some old smartphones laying around like the Galaxy S3, S5, Sony Z5 and I know that they together hold some CPU power.

So Im curious if anybody knows a way to turn these into miners ?

I've searched through the internet but couldnt fond anything useful.

I'm theorizing it should be doable by installing Linux on these phones and then letting a mining software run on them?

I think so because I remember installing Win95 on the S3, so 1+1 maybe ?

Thanks in advance < 3

Edit;
Btw I know it's not "worth" it to mine and that its cheaper to buy (heck even faucets pay more than what I theoretically can mine) but I just love the idea of making old useless phones do something :p

it would work like shit for btc.

so it would need to be for an alt coin


which means you should have posted in alt coin section not here.

edit I asked for mods to move to alt coins.

Ah thanks, newbie mistake I guss x_x

Nah, not even for altcoins... You can only fake "mine" with a cellphone, some altcoins have released apps in the past that were incorrectly called miners. As long as you ran these apps, the creators would send altcoins to your wallet, but you weren't actually mining with your phone.

@OP: if you want to learn about mining, you can mine monero with a decent cpu (altough you'll never break even...), you can mine some altcoins with your GPU (very hard to break even) or you can buy a cheap ASIC. If it's really only learning, try mining on the testnet. That way you can solo mine and actually learn the basics. Testnet coins are worthless tough!

Mining =/= free money printing. No matter which piece of hardware you use to create hashes, you'll still have to make a lot of calculations to figure out if you can actually break even/make some profit.

Im using M2G Android Miner to mine Monero. But you need a lot of cellphones to achieve pc-like results.
Eg my S6 gets about 15 h/s, but my S9 gets 40+ h/s.

Check this one and might interest you in https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5120083.0

Im not shilling nor recommend for you to engage but since this one involves some mining using up smartphones.Dont know if it does work.

Smartphone miners are all scams because nobody with a clue takes smartphone mining
seriously. The apps target naive newbies who would fall for "make money fast" scams.

Mining is a compute intensive program that requires heavy duty compute power that
can handle a full load continously. Anything portable is intentionally designed opposite.
They are designed to use as little power as possible to conserve battery life and don't
have the cooling capacity to run hard for any length of time.

Its pretty bad that an S9 can get 40H/s when an RX 470 gpu gets like 1000H/s. The RX 470 can be had for like $50 on eBay and an S9 is still a pretty expensive phone. It also has a battery inside that will most likely explode due to the sheer constant heat of the mining. And right now its not profitable to mine with the RX 470, so mining with an S9 is even worse.

If you really want some money and got some spare phones, just put them on Craigslist and sell them for cash and use that cash to buy crypto instead. Not really worth the headache and like the above poster have said, its a scam fad and the other phone miners are fake mining and you won't actually make any profit.

You are absolutely right. I just mentioned these numbers to show how tiny they are. Phones just cant compete with pc cpus and gpus. But thats just because of the overhead costs, the hashrate per wattage ratio is pretty much equal compared to my 1080s on Monero.

Nevertheless I wouldnt call it scam because it is what it is. Everybody can run the numbers and compare it to see it's not worth it out of a financial point of view. But it still serves the general idea of decentralization and for some it's just fun to see and try if something works even if it makes no sense.

Btw my S6's temperatures arent that high. Just about 40-50° Celsius. They get way hotter playing mobile games for example. My guess is phone gpu causing most of the heat which isnt used for mining. But Im no expert, correct me if I'm wrong.

it does not look like any one has tried it for lots of coin. I also dont think many of these phones have strong hardware that can handle mining, what of the low battery capacity of those phones?

I'd tried it back when coinhive is a thing (for testing purposes), so I'm talking about Monero.

I used one Samsung S4 (about <10h/s) device to calculate if 10 or more can produce a decent amount of profit... and the result was like everyone is saying: it's a waste of time and mobile phones if you're planning to use your own devices because charger's pulling more power than the hashrate.
Those "mobile miners" aren't really designed for "personal" mining but for the so-called "advertisement-substitute" or botnets (hundred or thousand devices that you don't supply power and own will do :P).

So @Flyingterlik forget it.

---

Why don't you just sell them?

I am assuming that the miner software you downloaded for your phone was using the GPU instead of the CPU to mine, since GPUs work better than CPU in mining. This is only a guess, I don't know anything about the M2G android miner.

One thing you need to realize is that when someone is playing a high intensity game on their phone, they usually hold it in their hands and their hands are actually the heatsink and its what lowers the temperatures. When you put the phone on a wooden table and leave it mining for hours plugged into the wall, then it will have much higher temperatures.

Samsung did a project as a POC a while back, but obviously they have plenty of smartphone resources. If I recall, the things you'd need to do are write a custom firmware for the phone (to remove the powersaving barriers, run 100% util for 24h, etc, all those things phones aren't designed to do), and most importantly hack into the hardware, add a massive external cooler/WB to the chip, and bypass the battery so it doesn't explode. Probs need a custom miner too.

Obviously, once you've done all this you end up with a pretty poor hashrate (compared to a desktop CPU) so really, really, really not worth the hassle. For example, you could go experiment chaining together cheap Ryzens for RandomX, which might actually make some money soon, and would be a hell of a lot easier.

Hi,

I've been experimenting mining with old phones, Android devices & SBC's like Pi devices over this past year.

Some results are quite good considering the very low power costs and the use of old hardware that most people just have in a drawer.

I'm currently mining Turtlecoin + Loki, also Veruscoin, VeriumReserve & uPlexa. I've covered the process and results in a few videos.

Crypto Mining Update | New RTX Rig
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuY6uET4wXY (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuY6uET4wXY)

Crypto Mining On ATOMIC Pi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNilRSJsveI (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNilRSJsveI)

Android Mining Guide [NO ROOT] - How To Mine uPlexa On Mobile Phones & TV Boxes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCwu0FqcO_M (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCwu0FqcO_M)

Android Mining Guide - How To Mine Crypto Coins On Mobile Phones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_2XEM7qzQE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_2XEM7qzQE)

I think you should not use smartphones for PoW cryptocurrency mining . This is a meaningless occupation that will not bring you anything except a damaged battery in your phone. The only option that can be used for mining on a smartphone is a PoS mining of coins that support it on their android wallets.

That's one of the fake miners i was talking about... "Cloud based mining on your phone" = "receiving coins for running a non-mining app".

People should really stop referring to those apps as mining software since it confuses newbies...

on older smartphones and so processors are weak, if they still load up to 100 percent, they will soon end, because overheating is provided

Agreed, most phones (if not all) are not built to run 100% CPU load 24/7. Even if you add custom cooling/etc the costs would far outweigh the rewards.

I think it's not worth it, how many smartphones and how much you need to remake to somehow compare with the PC

I have no opinion about this one way or another... I just have a problem with the word "mining"... It makes newbies (and some more established members) think they're actually using their phone to mine, this is false. They're getting some tokens to run a non-mining app on their phone. I have no idear what those apps are doing, but one thing is sure: they're not trying to find a hash of a blockheader that's under a certain target...

I also don't like people advertising cloud mining projects. I've been in this community for a relatively long time (allmost 5 years) and i've seen dozen of cloud "mining" companies. Most of them turn out to be a ponzi or a plain scam. The few that are not a ponzi or a scam sell 100% of the risk for a small part of the profit.
In the case of certain coins designed for mobile phones i can understand the fact that putting out a fake miner and distribute tokens accordingly might be one of the only options for fair distrubution, they still should have chosen a different terminology for their app tough.

Cloud mining I do not argue, it is good. But what about phones with small useless processors that even a dollar a month is not working?!

The slow processor will not work for the accuracy mining, as you can see even though we are using the efficient hardware for the ETN mining we are not  getting coins, so we should always choose high-speed mobile phones, otherwise, we will not make even 1$ for the month.

What do you mean by "like a car... it works"? Congrats on your project, but a little explanation might come in handy, especially for those of us that won't just click any link posted on this forum.
The only way i can imagine this working is if your project is completely closed source using a propriatary hashing algo as POW algo, and if you only release closed source mining software for android mining on a closed source pool with closed source binary nodes and closed source wallets. In this case, your plan would work, but you'd force people to actually harm their phones while mining...

If you open source the mining software or the node software, what would prevent anyone from mining with a "decent" (non-mobile) cpu which would be superior to any mobile cpu both in actual hashrate as in hashes generated per Joule. As soon as people start using desktop or server cpu's, the difficulty would skyrocket and everybody burning their phones while mining would see their income plummet.

Mining on GPUs is already pretty much unprofitable. Mining on a cell phone is just pointless mate. These things can also run really hot really fast. Sure, you could place a fan in front of your cell phone(s) to cool them, but that's like 40W of electricity you will spend cooling those devices that will barely bring in a cent.

Here's a better idea: cell that cell phone or those cell phones you have and buy BTC or ETH with the cash you get. You'll thank me later.

You would destroy your phone, you are better of selling these phones on ebay or something. At least you will get some worth and less headache to deal with.

Like many others, there was mining on a smartphone, but the money earned from it was penny.
But over time, there were problems with the processor, which resulted in a fast discharge of the battery.
The only thing I can offer is to listen to the radio: bitrad.io and get a small income.
https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/bitradio/

Guys, we know most of coins that allows users to "mining" with smartphone, don't do the real mining, it's only an app to calculate the power of your smartphone, and you earn coin based on that

But don't you think these apps can stole some data from you?
I'm afraid and will not use any app of this kind

This app does not mine something at all. It is just an airdrop.

So it will take you 350 phones to equal one of my procs on xmr.
i have 37 of them on it so about 13,000 phones is what you will need.
This will earn you about $50 a day BEFORE power.

Good luck...i dont think you understand scale and scope of what you ask.

This is celeron mining all over again ehhe, trolls used 60 watts of power per hour, total of 24 x 60 = almost 1.5kwh, that is $0.15 in the USA to mine $0.01 of value hehe

The world changed. You should take a look at:
* https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5338550
* https://discord.gg/DxpcCDpUyN

64-bit ARMv8 CPUs in phones are really promising and energy-efficient when mining some coins.

wow thats neat! smartphones do indeed have alot more power nowadays people are already working on ways to replace gaming consoles for decent games with em... Your thread is closed though... do you have any open threads where users are talking about it? Im quite keen i should have afew hundred phones lying around using android lol

Sorry. I do not know why it is closed. Just posted a new one:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5338550

Thank you!