“Mobile mining” is essentially a marketing trick one of the irrelevant altcoins dubbed Electroneum put forward to grow their userbase. In effect, their users just receive free ETN tokens for leaving their app installed and running on their phones – a proof of elapsed time, if you will.
Mining isn’t usually associated with mobile devices. Whenever someone mentions crypto mining to you, you will probably think of all those wasted 1080Ti’s endlessly kicking up dust and coins in a Chinese hangar or, as of late, those ASIC mining devices doing the same, just 10 times more effectively. However, apparently some people figured out a couple of ways to use a regular old Android phone for this purpose.
Yes, the sentence above does imply IOS doesn’t have any way of allowing you to mine cryptocurrency. So if you figured you could kick off a mining side thing with your iPhone, you aren’t in luck. Android users are the only ones who have the “privilege” to become mobile miners as of now. And yes, the word privilege is in quotes for a reason as well.
Regular mining uses your computer processor or your GPU power to solve a proof of work algorithm of a coin to create a new block, add it to the blockchain and receive the mining reward for his work. Recently, pool mining has been invented, where pool operator does the work and members of the pool contribute their processing power and receive a fitting reward for that. A pool will have a bigger chance to mine out the block himself but its participants will have to share the prize among themselves, per processing power they invested.
Mobile mining will work this way sometimes, giving you a piece of the mining reward for sharing your processing power with the network. And since the processing power of your phone is miniscule compared to a Chinese mining hangar, or even your neighbor’s graphic card, the rewards from mobile mining won’t be so great. Other times the mining won’t really be mining but will function like an airdrop, where you will be given a tiny amount of coin just for sticking around. So the verdict is that mobile mining isn’t worth the effort, data plan and battery usage and should be avoided.
But say you don’t like being told what to do or want to attempt this endeavor yourself to see if we are trying to trick you and hold all the mobile mining rewards for ourselves. Of course, we will let you make up your own mind. In that spirit, the rest of the article will be focused on presenting you the best mobile mining alternatives out there.
Electroneum
Electroneum is a Monero-based currency used to make private peer-to-peer payments, just like its father coin. It’s however different from Monero in the sense that its creators decided to simplify its use as much as possible. Fees, complicated technology and terminology, lack of merchants can limit one’s ability to use a cryptocurrency. Electroneum devs look to eliminate most of these annoyances and adjust their currency to be mobile friendly, and that includes making the mining process easier and mobile friendly as well.
Here is a guide about ETN “mobile mining”. And here is another article about Electroneum’s future in 2019 and 2020, along with price forecast.
Electroneum team realized that cryptocurrency mining can be a very daunting prospect for someone just moving into these waters. Therefore, they set about to create a currency mineable by everyone. Electroneum uses an ASIC resistant mining algorithm which basically makes it impossible for ASIC miners to mine it.
The reward for mining out an Electroneum block will go to a miner or a mining pool, whoever solves the complex mathematical task first. The competition is pretty big at the moment and with the current block reward being 6413,56 ETN (1 ETN=0.022619 USD at the time of writing) chances are you won’t receive much for your mining contribution. It’s also possible to solo mine it, with the hash rate you are able to achieve moving around 40 hashes per second. While currently available for free and only on Android and PC, Electroneum announced that their miner will soon become listed on Apple Store as well.
To become an Electroneum miner, you need to complete a couple of steps:
1) Download and install the Electroneum app from the Google Play store
2) Register an account by visiting my.electroneum.com and filling in the information requested
3) A verification e-mail will be sent to you; verify your email address by visiting your inbox and clicking the link in it
4) Provide your mobile phone number. Electroneum will then send a code to the number. This stops people creating many different accounts. When it arrives, enter the code into the box on the registration page
5) Provide an alternative email address for restoration purposes if you lose the PIN code for your account
6) Use a PIN code that you won’t forget. You will need this every time you launch the app or when sending transactions
7) Finally, head back to your email inbox and click the link in the email sent to you. This confirms that you have received a PIN recovery email. You can now log in to the app
They recently launched their specialized phone for mining, M1 that costs around $80. And they also lifted the threshold for the payments from 10 to 100 ETN per user. Considering the current price of the token, users “mine” (read get airdropped) $3-5 per month, not a fortune really.
Many people have successfully mined ETN with this app. However, there is an apparent bug which troubles Electroneum mobile miners; many users whose balances went over 10 ETN are unable to send this money to another wallet.
Aaaand that’s about it
Like we said before, mobile mining isn’t really an option in this day and age when industrial strength miners are threatening to take over the market. We can perhaps mention software like DroidMiner. DroidMiner is a BTC/LTC/DOGE based mining software that can be downloaded from the Google Play store. Previously called DroidBTC Bitcoin miner, currently it is set to mine cryptocurrencies which use SHA-256/Scrypt cryptographic algorithms. Websites like coinpot.io, freebit.co.in offer the faucet-like service which gives you slow and steady drips of cryptocurrency we mentioned above in the article.
Electroneum popularized the idea of mobile mining and in this day and age it isn’t very useful. While there are no major costs required to acquire and set up the “mobile mining gear”, you will be much better off if you save up for a real GPU or ASIC miner. Granted, some poor third worlder won’t mind mining out a few dollars a day (at best) but most people from the developed world won’t see many riches from this practice. Until we go back in time when Bitcoin was mined with Pentium IV PC’s, mobile mining will remain just a pointless gimmick.
Mib Coin offers real Mobile Mining on both iOS and Android. It’s the first and only crypto that provides real phone mining.