Mining Cryptocurrency on $10 Cellphone

Well, this will be my second post. Hope the pictures show up this time.

I'm writing this because I've read so many articles that say you cannot mine bitcoin with a cellphone. In fact, I've heard some pretty nasty name calling for those unfortunate individuals who have asked the question.

The short answer is that you absolutely cannot mine bitcoin with a cellphone with an ARM processor. You would mine forever and never find anything. You also couldn't mine most other types of cryptocurrencies out there either. However, it IS possible to make some cryptocoins using a cellphone. The trick is to pick the right cryptocoin!

Scrypt can be optimized for low memory, high frequency calculations which is why you get hashrates in the billions. A cellphone could never keep up with that. So bitcoin, litecoin, etc are out of the question.

Ethash does well with the high number of stream processors in video cards and your cellphone is lucky to have more than four cores. So mining ethereum is out.

Cryptonight does well with a full scale processor that can perform complex calculations. It does well with CPU's and that is exactly what your cellphone has. True the cellphone can't keep up with a full power PC but then again, it uses very little electricity so its not such a terrible comparison. Monero is the king of the cryptonight coins right now but if you want there are others you could try (Fantomcoin would be my second choice)

Having said that, one little cellphone calculating in a room would take forever to work its way through to make even a small dent in a blockchain so mining solo is out. To make anything work the phone will have to be part of a pool. Also to work on your cellphone its going to have to have an app for it. If your with Android, Minergate has you covered on both fronts.

So for this writeup I have a cheap, cheap, tracfone that I purchased for $9.99 at BestBuy. It is an Alcatel Pixi with a 1.1Ghz Dual Core ARM processor. Its pretty sad but it does meet with the minergate app minimum specs.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9TbtRrZyT0QN0NtYnB4TWRSalE

After getting the phone I put three apps on it:

The first app is minergate. It runs the app and manages a meager 4.5 H/second while mining Monero. In more practical terms 4.5h/s gives me about $4.50 Canadian dollars over a year of mining. Its not much but it IS something. Then there is the electricity cost. Where I live I pay 12.3c per KWh of electricity. In easier terms I pay about $1/year for a watt. The cellphone uses 2.5 watts so I pay $2.50 a year for the electrcity. In short my $10 phone pays out about $2 per year ($4.50 income - $2.50expense).

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9TbtRrZyT0QMDdMWXVMb1N2V28

So, it will make a little money. Whether it is worthwhile or not I'll leave up to you.

For me $2/year isn't really worth it which is why I added two more apps.

Second app is a simple clock and alarm (which is visible in the first picture). Leave it plugged in all the time and there is a continual alarm clock waiting to give you the time and wake you up in the morning.

The third app is Text Now. It connects to the wifi in the house and lets me send text messages and make phone calls. That way there is a free phone doubling as my alarm clock. Turns a lousy $10 phone into a phone and clock that pays me a little more money every year.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B9TbtRrZyT0QOWM5M05UZ0MydjA