BTC mining in your telephone - yes or no

[HeroCat]

Just think - your telephone is always on. If with special BTC miner you can mine some BTC in your telephone - why not ? But the monthly BTC profit can be very low, because telephone can not mine a lot. 

[BigBoy89]

Just think - your telephone is always on. If with special BTC miner you can mine some BTC in your telephone - why not ? But the monthly BTC profit can be very low, because telephone can not mine a lot. 

Lol that's an innovative idea at least we could earn some Bitcoin from telephone something is better than nothing, may in future they might come up with something like that.

[Amph]

the problem is not if you can as usual, but that it is worth it? no because you will mine few satoshi, actually not even 1(cpu hash rate is very low) in a very long time frame

maybe in the "fee era" it might have sense, because one satoshi will be worth much more, i guess

[jokerboy]

You need to plug your phone to the charge all the time and in return of you get approximately nothing.
So it is not a prefable choice.

[altcoinhosting]

A miner for android already exists. It burns your phone and kills your battery in mere hours.

[tiggytomb]

Yes, a good idea but there is already a miner out there which you can find by searching the play store for Android.  It is just not worth it at all as it destroys the lifespan of your phone and the level we are at now the latest phones are not powerful enough to make it worthwhile.

[Raimonn]

oh minining with a mobile...  i think that you will spend more on recharge your battery than the cost of the few satoshis that you will receive. And its possible that you burn the telephone.

[Yakamoto]

Just think - your telephone is always on. If with special BTC miner you can mine some BTC in your telephone - why not ? But the monthly BTC profit can be very low, because telephone can not mine a lot. 

I know it sounds like a good idea, but the thing is that phones do not generate enough power to do any worthwhile mining, even less than what you'd get from using a single computer GPU.

Mining would also generate way too much heat, unless you have it run at its lowest setting so that there is no way it will overheat. All the components are incredibly close together, and so any excess heat would damage the phone.

Even if you were to earn 0.0000001BTC a block mining from your phone, there is no way it would be worth it.

[P4ndoraBox7]

Mining drain a lot of electricity.

Your cellphone will probably last only 30 minutes with a full charge.

I would only recommend https://minergate.com/ if you have a decent GPU...Cpu mining just doesnt worth the shot.

[orryde]

Well, no.
For the following reasons.
1. You would pay more for power than you would make in Bitcoin.
2. You would overload the electronic components on your phone, as mining is very resource hungry. This would cause your phone to lag and/or reduce its lifespan.

[P4ndoraBox7]

Well, no.
For the following reasons.
1. You would pay more for power than you would make in Bitcoin.
2. You would overload the electronic components on your phone, as mining is very resource hungry. His would cause your phone to lag and/or reduce its lifespan.

+1

[mwizard]

Just think - your telephone is always on. If with special BTC miner you can mine some BTC in your telephone - why not ? But the monthly BTC profit can be very low, because telephone can not mine a lot.  

Lets look at the math.  A typically mobile phone battery stores about 6 Watt Hours.  

Say you use a third for mining. That means you can mine with 1 Watt power for 2 hours.

Phone with ASIC mining chip

Say the phone has the latest and most efficient mining chip running at 0.1J/GH,  you will do 10 GH for 2 hours.

This will earn you about 0.2 of a cent for the day.  Say 500 Satoshi per day.

If you did it every day for a year, and difficulty did, not rise you would earn about 70 cents per year.

This would not even cover the cost of adding the mining chip to the phone.

Using a standard phone without any special mining chips

Assuming a standard mobile phone can mine about about 10 Megahash/s and it mines for 2 hours its mining speed will be about a thousandth of the phone with an mining chip.

So expect to make about .0002 cents per day or 0.07 cents over a year.  Say 0.5 Satoshi per day or 200 Satoshi over a year.  It would take 50 years to make the equivalent of a single transaction fee (10,000 Satoshi).

In both mobile phone cases you will need to cover the extra cost of the electricity to recharge the now more frequently discharged phone, any extra data cost, as well as the reduced battery and phone life.

Mining in your phone charger.

Every now and again someone suggest mining using a phone charger, as if a phone charger has free electricity.  A typical mobile phone charger is very electrically efficient and extremely cheap. It draws only about 0.1 Watt when not charging a phone.  Adding mining to a charger increases the chargers power draw and you need to add all the bits required for a miner, ASIC chips, internet access etc.  

You no longer have a $5 phone charger but an expensive, power hungry free standing miner with a USB port.

Feel free to correct or comment on any errors in the above.

[cancerbola]

Well, no.
For the following reasons.
1. You would pay more for power than you would make in Bitcoin.
2. You would overload the electronic components on your phone, as mining is very resource hungry. This would cause your phone to lag and/or reduce its lifespan.

Would it work if:

1. You plugged your phone charger into a library or shopping mall's power socket? (Or any source of free electricity)
2. Limited the CPU activity thus lowering the heat in the components?

But yeah, I agree that mining with a mobile phone isn't profitable, because you still have to buy the phone.
Modern smartphones are $500+, right? You could buy a proper bitcoin miner with that....

[Blawpaw]

No way man, you will push your phone more than he can handle and that won't be worth the effort. If you mine with your phone you will decrease the lifespan of your device for nothing in return.

[Arrakeen]

What if instead of the phone's CPU doing the mining, it connects to a remote source - and with thousands of phones connecting, achieves some desirable result?  For example (a very, very, very bad and not recommended example) a botnet-type service, maybe performing beneficial tasks, rather than performing random DDoS attacks at the hands of some middle-school kid trying to skip detention 


We have to think in theory before taking a first step - because it's already common knowledge a phone won't generate anything worthwhile through its own hardware.

[ranochigo]

Well, no.
For the following reasons.
1. You would pay more for power than you would make in Bitcoin.
2. You would overload the electronic components on your phone, as mining is very resource hungry. This would cause your phone to lag and/or reduce its lifespan.

Would it work if:

1. You plugged your phone charger into a library or shopping mall's power socket? (Or any source of free electricity)
2. Limited the CPU activity thus lowering the heat in the components?

But yeah, I agree that mining with a mobile phone isn't profitable, because you still have to buy the phone.
Modern smartphones are $500+, right? You could buy a proper bitcoin miner with that....

1. The battery would still degrade significantly. It is hard to mine 24 hours anywhere without your own electricity.
2. And thus lowering the earnings. In the long run, your components will still degrade.
It's possible to hook up a phone to an ASIC. BFL have done this before. But, a raspberry pi is much better.
The CPU in smartphones are designed to be run more efficiently without emitting much heat. By using your phone to mine, the phone would trap heat since it only have passive closed cooling and would result in overheating. A 5 year old [computer]* is better than the latest phone when mining.

*Forgot that a human can't mine faster than a phone.

[Arrakeen]

A 5 year old is better than the latest phone when mining.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think child labor would do well for bitcoin's image 

[-ck]

This is ridiculous. A phone mining 24/7 for a year would earn .0000001 bitcoin and no pool would ever let you cash it out. On the other hand the battery +/- the phone itself would have been destroyed in the interim.

Please don't even discuss such nonsense notions.

[USB-S]

This is ridiculous. A phone mining 24/7 for a year would earn .0000001 bitcoin and no pool would ever let you cash it out. On the other hand the battery +/- the phone itself would have been destroyed in the interim.

Please don't even discuss such nonsense notions.

I wouldn't really put down this idea yet. We have several generation of chips ahead of us, where there may be some extra energy efficient one, that would run with ease on everyday devices. If 21inc developed a "computer" for bitcoin, then why not a phone for bitcoin?

[notlist3d]

This is ridiculous. A phone mining 24/7 for a year would earn .0000001 bitcoin and no pool would ever let you cash it out. On the other hand the battery +/- the phone itself would have been destroyed in the interim.

Please don't even discuss such nonsense notions.

I wouldn't really put down this idea yet. We have several generation of chips ahead of us, where there may be some extra energy efficient one, that would run with ease on everyday devices. If 21inc developed a "computer" for bitcoin, then why not a phone for bitcoin?

But on my phone I would rather it have longer life then mining all the time.  I will have items that mine in my mining area... why put it in a mobile phone?

Something with zero cooling in a pocket all day.  Using battery life.  Sounds like a really bad idea.