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HTC's Blockchain Phone Takes Over a Century To Mine Enough Crypto To Pay For Itself (theverge.com) 35

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: HTC's Exodus blockchain smartphones will soon receive their own mining app, letting them mine Monero cryptocurrency when plugged in and idle, The Block reported earlier this month. The DeMiner app, which is being developed by Midas Labs, is scheduled to launch in Q2 2020. According to Midas Labs' Jri Lee, one of HTC's Exodus 1S smartphones should be able to mine $0.0038 of Monero a day, which doesn't exactly turn the phone into a moneymaking machine. In fact, Decrypt ran the numbers and found that, at that rate, you'd be in line to make just over a dollar a year ($1.387). That means you'd pay off $237 Exodus 1S in around 170 years -- excluding electricity costs, that is.
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HTC's Blockchain Phone Takes Over a Century To Mine Enough Crypto To Pay For Itself More

HTC's Blockchain Phone Takes Over a Century To Mine Enough Crypto To Pay For Itself

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  • Bitcoin sounds cool, but I'm not wasting $10 buying a hundred of 'em!

  • > you'd be in line to make just over a dollar a year ($1.387)... excluding electricity costs

    Soo Sweet.

    • So if I bought 100 of them, I could pay them off in only a year?

    • Yeah, when "Decrypt ran the numbers" I bet they were shocked by the result.

      I understand it's a lot of number crunching but you'd think HTC would have allocated some server time towards calculating this figure during the R&D phase.

  • HTC's Blockchain Phone Takes Over a Century To Mine Enough Crypto To Pay For Itself

    But that is assuming current prices.

    Do you think the people that spent maybe $100 on electricity back in the day fell like they were stupid when they managed to mine several bitcoins, that were worth much less than $100 at the time?

    Yes it's a gamble. It could be that BTC will fall to nothing and it would take a million years for the phone mining to pay off. Or maybe Bitcoin would surge to some massive value at some point an

    • The problem is the efficiency and the relevance. If you want to bet on some crypto currency, do it. Buy some. Or use hardware that's actually efficient at doing that.

      Using your phone will use extra electricity and mine a ridiculously small amount. Even if it was the most efficient way to mine (Watt per Coin), you'd need to buy and run 24/7 thousands of phones to make any significant money ... that is, if it ends up having any value.

      So it just makes no sense. Sounds like a scam.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Junta ( 36770 )

      Reality is that proof-of-work cryptocurrency will never be worth it to mine on a phone. Let's say the value of one 'coin' shoots up. So too will mining difficulty. So while it mines 'x' number of coins per day today, if the value goes up by 100 fold, then you'll see that it will only mine 'x/100' per day then.

      I suppose you could make the argument if you mined x today then the value of x could be massive tomorrow, but if you really cared you'd actually pursue a more appropriate mining rig and be even bett

    • So if buying the phone is a gamble, why not eliminate the wasted energy of mining worthless fake money and simply include everyone who buys the phone in a monthly or yearly lottery of some cash? "If you buy this phone you might win $10k" sounds a lot more appealing than "If you buy this phone it will grind away for hour after hour, draining your battery, while it mines a tiny fraction of a penny per day."

    • HTC's Blockchain Phone Takes Over a Century To Mine Enough Crypto To Pay For Itself

      But that is assuming current prices.

      Do you think the people that spent maybe $100 on electricity back in the day fell like they were stupid when they managed to mine several bitcoins, that were worth much less than $100 at the time?

      Yeah, but.... if that's what you believe you could go out and buy $5 of Monero instead of this overpriced phone.

  • Mining crypto on your phone is like adding solar cells to your EV. Seems like a good idea, but specialization of purpose is much more important. Ultimately you're going to get clobbered in the market by someone who drives cost out and core feature value up.

    • Yeah, even worse, since solar cells keep getting cheaper, but the computation required for a bitcoin keeps growing exponentially (by design).

      This seems like an app/feature that sounded clever about 2.5 years ago when they started on it.

  • ...There is a reason pretty much all phones have power saving and speed throttling built in: battery life.
    Running them full tilt all day long means you'll have to recharge your phone by noon. Most smartphones barely get 24hrs with normal use, let alone cryptomining continuously.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lazarus ( 2879 )

      HTC's Exodus blockchain smartphones will soon receive their own mining app, letting them mine Monero cryptocurrency when plugged in and idle

      Sorry mate, but did you read the summary? :)

      • (img src="you_must_be_new_here.gif")

        • Yes, user 2879 must be new here.

          And sure, nobody reads TFA around here, but spewing idiocy without even reading the first sentence of the SUMMARY deserves to be called out. Stop accepting it. Demand a better breed of idiot.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • On the one hand, I want to laugh at this crap and mock it... but on the other, I mined a few dozen bitcoin back in the day just geeking out for kicks and literally threw them away thinking they'd never be worth anything and kick myself for it now.

  • It's good that this thing exists (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GameboyRMH ( 1153867 ) <gameboyrmh@Nospam.gmail.com> on Thursday April 30, 2020 @04:28PM (#60008846) Journal

    Future alien archaeologists can use this phone to demonstrate why our species failed with a single artifact.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • I'm half-joking, but there are many other important factors where we're not on a great trajectory, with the global warming and the Anthropocene mass extinction and the runaway inequality and the resurgent fascism.

        • My own expectation is that without an effective COVID vaccine, in 25 years life will be like it was in the 2nd half of the 19th century. I'll never know.

    • Hmph. As if any electronic product these days will survive long enough to be dug up by future generations.

      If there were a Z80 in that phone, I could believe it. You can get schematics for a Gameboy no problem. 8)

  • That means you'd pay off $237 Exodus 1S in around 170 years ...

    ... if the phone will last, and will get software updates, for 170 years ... I wonder how many battery replacements that would be and how that would affect the pay-off timetable. On the up-side, I hear the phone is future-proofed to support 97G (AT&T already does with using 5G Evolution).

    • Since it only mines when it is plugged iny it may be safe to assume it bypasses the battery to do that.

      • Since it only mines when it is plugged iny it may be safe to assume it bypasses the battery to do that.

        Sure, but using it as a phone will use the battery, unless you intend to keep it plugged in for 170 years, in which case, that's basically a landline. :-)

  • In fact, Decrypt ran the numbers and found that

    I don't think you can really call multiplying by 365 "running the numbers".

  • ... to get money, whitout doing just as much work as the one had to do, who paid you that damn money.

    Anything else, like Bitcoin "mining" when the money does not pretty much entirely go towards electricity, is functionally equivalent to theft, robbery, usury an fraud.

  • A few years ago I heard about this new thing called Bitcoin. I had a couple of old computers laying idle at home, so I installed a miner in one, joined a mining pool, and let it run.

    After a few days, I shut it down and deleted the miner because I decided it wasn't worth my time. After all, in several days I had mined only about half a Bitcoin, and I estimated I would be mining at most 5-6 Bitcoins a month, or about $20 (IIRC).

    This phone isn't about the value of cryptocurrency today: it's about what the valu

  • According to Midas Labs' Jri Lee, one of HTC's Exodus 1S smartphones should be able to mine $0.0038 of Monero a day, which doesn't exactly turn the phone into a moneymaking machine. In fact, Decrypt ran the numbers and found that, at that rate, you'd be in line to make just over a dollar a year ($1.387).

    You scoff, but I ask you, what does your cellphone

    do to help offset it's cost?

    You fancy current model iPhone has a real wizard of a CPU, how much Monero can it mine in a day? In a year?

    The Exodus 1S costs a fraction of the cheapest current iPhone model (iPhone SE at $500) AND has some mechanism to produce actual, if trivial revenue.

    • Mining crypto (Bitcoin in particular) is so energy intensive it should be considered a crime against the planet.

      How much will the electricity cost to generate that $1.387 over an entire year? A lot more than $1.387, unless you're getting your electricity for free. And if you're getting electricity for free, you could just sell THAT for a lot more than $1.387 per year, instead of burning it on absurdly inefficient crypto mining.

      Bottom line is, given the cost of energy, this thing LOSES money for you. So wh

  • Because "crypto" in "crypto-currency" is already an abbreviation, obviously, and a far older one.

  • Richard Hendricks will be crushed that his cell-phone distributed-computing idea doesn't work.

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