Since most of us who have been into the Cryptocurrency space know that the base of a crypto coin is mining. That’s how these cryptocurrencies come into existence. But, only a few actually would know that you could mine these coins at your home or office, and it isn’t some private contractors that are doing it for you. Buying a crypto coin or mining it is totally dependent on your choice and the plan of investment, so the point here is that anyone can mine a cryptocurrency, given that they have the right resources for the same.
Now, while I said that you can easily mine – It is what it is. Easy, because you just have to set the software once and it would then interact with the hardware of your PC or laptop and start the mining process. But then, there were many who always asked about mining these coins on their smartphones. After all, spending hundreds of dollars on a phone and seeing it do nothing but help you with the social updates isn’t worthy, right? Let’s talk about “crypto mining on a smartphone”.
To give an answer in short – Yes, mining some crypto coins on your smartphone is possible. But, there’s a lot of conditions that apply and requirements at a minimum for that to happen, and that too efficiently. Here’s what you need to know about the possibilities, the costs involved, and the return on investments.
The costs involved are two – the smartphone cost, Internet connectivity cost, and the power cost.
Mining a bitcoin actually requires your processor cores to work and write the code, make the calculations, and finally, they come up with the shares in the pool that accumulates to convert into a certain amount of the coin you are trying to mine.
Let’s take the Minergate app for example. It is one of the best apps that you can use to mine some coins, though it doesn’t let you mine Bitcoin or Ethereum because it isn’t the app but the smartphone that is at fault for not being able to mine these coins. Some coins that can be mined on a smartphone are Monero, Fantomcoin, Bytecoin, DigitalNote, and Dashcoin among others. The mining of any of them and the speed of mining depends on the processor power.
I’ve personally tried mining Monero and Bytecoin on smartphones and I had specifically chosen four smartphones, each of them having a different processor. Unlike some fake mining apps that show a positive progress even when you aren’t connected, Minergate actually uses your phone’s CPU and that is why you’d see that the phone is heated to alarming levels all the time when the mining is in progress.
Now, if your phone is heating up, it is at the risk of damaging itself. The solution for that is by keeping it at a place where it can be easily chilled – under the fan, or in front of the AC. Also, because mining not just heats up the phone but also keeps the processor and display active, thus the battery drain you see is also very fast. What you need here is a continuous charging of the device. While you charge your phone and the mining is active, the heating doesn’t really go down because even the battery is now heated up. In the end, you are going to pay for the power consumption for the cooling source, the power consumption for charging the phone, and also for the Internet that is used to keep sharing and calculating the progress.
Is all of this feasible if you mine from your smartphone?
In the shorter run, no, it wouldn’t really help. After months of mining, you would be hardly making one full Monero coin from your high-end smartphone that has the latest ARM-based processor and a good clock speed. But, that wouldn’t look good when you have a short-term approach to it. For a longer run, you will see its value. The value of every cryptocurrency right now is growing and while you are mining any coin, you are not mining it at a value equalling to any fiat currency, but the mining happens to count the crypto-coin – You don’t mine something worth $10 but it is worth 1 coin, so that’s the good side of it. That same 1 coin can be worth $50 in the future.
For whatever approach you have, the smartphone you are going to use for mining the crypto is going to be kept aside and you wouldn’t be able to do the normal functions, otherwise, the effectiveness of mining goes down. So, if you are serious about mining Cryptocurrency on your smartphone, it is better to take these factors into consideration that you would not be using your primary smartphone for mining, and that you are going to see costs for power usage involved.
If we are talking Bitcoins, it is said that over 10 million smartphones mining for over 24 hours continuously will generate enough hash to mine one full Bitcoin. So you can imagine how hard it is when we talk about particular coins to mine, but then, you can check out some Altcoins to mine only if you are in a mood to experiment.
But if we are talking about certain Altcoins, the processing done and the hash rate of mining seen on smartphones is higher than PCs and laptops. It is all dependent on what you are aiming to mine and whether you are ready to accept the things involved around that.
There’s a story from one guy who runs a mobile phone store and he explained how he used to mine CryptoNight protocol based altcoins and how successful he was in doing that on multiple phones together. It is possible, only if you have a certain number of devices lying around, and each of them has a good processing power to deliver the results that you want to see.
Bottom line – Mining cryptocurrency on a smartphone is very much possible. It is not possible to mine any coin but still, you cannot rule out the fact that smartphones are smart and strong enough to mine Altcoins. The degree to which they can mine them is less, but if you have smartphones to spare and are looking at mining coins, it is worth a try.
This post originally appeared on cryptotechstories.com.