Electroneum Mining on Mobile & Laptops.. Do or Not Do ? That is the Question
Electroneum mining on Mobile
My mobile phone is my lifeline. It's a Samsung S6 and it's nearly two years old. I'm out of contract at the end of November and I'll probably just keep it. I will go out of contract onto a SIM only deal where I will pay much less just for unlimited calls and xGB of data. Electroneum have come up with the idea of mining using mobile processors. The S6 has a fairly decent octa-core processor running at 2.1ghz. I also have an old S4 which has been mothballed. (apart from the fact that their mobile mining software has run into a few issues at launch) aww, I generally feel for them.
I don't think the phone will appreciate being run for mining electroneum and considering it's a £500+ gadget, my question is, how much is mining going to shorten it's relatively expensive lifetime / vs cost to replace ? my guess is that it's not going to be worth sacrificing it's remaining lifespan (18-24months) for the sake of a bit of (let's be honest) novelty mining.
I can imagine JOE PUBLIC proudly telling his mates down the pub, "I'm bitcoin mining, lads".. Gregg the Geek will say, really Joe, how many ASICS have you got plugged into next doors electricity in the garage. Joe will say, actually I'm mining Electroneum on my phone. Oh says Gregg, that must get hot in your pocket, don't burn your balls. How much have you made so far this month ? "so far, £2.07p" but Electroneum might go to the moon. It's your round JOE, get em in... etc, blah, yadda, etc.
Electroneum Mining on the PC
I tried the pc miner (see yesterday's article) on my laptop. Mining is not something I got into. I'm more of an analyst. Again it's a fairly decent machine (which I helped design, incidentally) and an essential part of my toolkit. It's a Dell XPS 15 and although it's a couple of years old, it has some quality features like an Intel 4712HQ @ 2.3ghz. 4 cores, 8 logical processors.
(and probably the best screen display I have ever used at an eye watering (near) 4k. it's a touchscreen too and comes with a rocket speed boot sequence, near silent, low power SSD / 16gb of RAM and to be honest. I'd be lost without it.
I tried it out on the Electroneum Mining pool last night and boy did it get warm. I could have cooked eggs on the bottom of the machine. It made me think that this use of the beautiful technology surely couldn't add up to a few Electroneum's worth of tokens for the wear and tear it would undoubtedly put on the machine. and surely shorten it's precious little life. (as mentioned it's my lifeline.)
In a couple of hours mining on the XPS at full steam ahead I made 0.13 Electroneum. one ETN is worth about 0.02p at the moment so just over 1/10th of that. micro-payments indeed. Were Electroneum to become the bitcoin of the next decade, it would be worth it. I may be wrong, but I can't really see ETN reaching £5,679 / $7,426 (today' price) which lets face it, is quite a feat. bitcoin is creeping up to $7500 !! put a couple of forks in that and it will slide, but hey ho, bitcoin hodlers, you lucky people ;)
Conclusion
Mobile mining is a great idea to get the public involved. I don't think it's for me. Mining on an expensive laptop. Good for networks, probably a bit like making your laptop smoke cigarettes. it will certainly generate extra new gadget sales for replacement items. I can see someone bringing out a phone with mining features especially aimed at the mobile miner as it becomes popular with the kids, running software on their mum and dads phones... shhhh don't tell them,
Why you should NOT get into cryptocurrency mining: https://steemit.com/mining/@walczakit/why-you-should-not-get-into-cryptocurrency-mining
I read it. excellent article. conclusions. why bother mining when you could speculate just as easy.. there is one caveat though. If you mine new coins, then you could mine them really cheaply and then they rocket. when bitcoin was a baby and the network was small, you could have mined 100btc per day on a p.c. At today's prices that would be about $4.5m per week. I don't think that will happen again, but you could be mining coins today that will be worth 10 or 20x their current value in a year or 3.. btw (Again) nice rig !
Mobile mining is not really going to be profitable but it helps the network, I guess that is the trade-off.
thanks @thomasfarley. yeah it also helps with public perception, rollout of the ecosystem and it sure helps the network, which may or may not be reflected in price gains.. it's a tough sell out there right now. I've lost track of how many new tokens are coming on stream. I only remember the ones with real BlockChain revolutionary disruption these days.. and I'm writing about them everyday !!
It actually doesn't help the network
I kind of thought that was the point of electroneum. do tell @dhouse :)
The mobile mining is a simulation basically, which will generate coins but not actually do anything, just to get people interested and hopefully some will switch to CPU or gpu mining. It's all in the whitepaper.
Ohhhhhh amazing
really ? you like it.. tell me more @darsien
good friend. follow me
comment ?
You'll probably kill that battery in that laptop in no time :P
yeah @crypto-trail. it's not the battery I'm worried about, it's that nice i7 processor !! my conclusion is that using your laptop at full power for mining electroneum is pc suicide for pennies.. uh uh no no
Mining is now something for those with high spec device...
Mobile, it's a waste of time... I'm writing about my recent encounter with mobile mining
good @anaman. once you've written it, post it here I'll read it.
I've released two already
https://steemit.com/mining/@anaman/how-to-mine-cryptocurrencies-using-mobile-1-minergate
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@anaman/how-to-mine-cryptocurrencies-using-mobile-2-crypto-miner
thanks @anaman I read both articles. useful for the setup information but I was really wanting to hear your opinions and insights into your experience. I think that's what most people want (and expect)
and anything else you feel might be relevant
It's left with a last post of the series but I would give you the gist here.
first I think what I was getting were just tokens comparing to electricity, data cost and lifespan deterioration of device, it wasn't profitable
I made some few litecoin and not upto minimum withdrawal threshold of 0.001 also hit the mini payout for bcn twice on the minergate.com but was probably because it was coupled with the desktop app mining
I stopped after a week, was kind of a way of experimenting
during the period of mining with app like crypto miner, phone cannot be used as app cannot be minimized (I was using free version), Miner gate and arm Miner can be minimized but phone becomes very slow. Also phone becomes very hot and I realized the battery of the Samsung tab3 became weak after this adventure
Thanks for checking them out
that was my original suspicion.. a new battery for your tab 3 = more than you can mine in a week ! anything without a battery is probably more useful
Probably but I don't think the cost of electricity would be compensated for
well luckily, there are plenty of other ways to make crypto ! steemit is an excellent option
That's the reason i have hooked up my mining rig to the ETN network and i'm using https://etnpool.net as mining pool.
ETN is a coin that does things different so they have a chance to grow, but don't expect that this will be the new bitcoin. As bitcoin is gold this could be one of many other valuable metals who can be traded at interesting prices.
good luck with it @mastahb. Someone has to work those dirty old crypto mines. I've worked out I can probably do a lot other things much better and use my computer equipment in creative ways in the the ecosystem.
When mining with mobile phone, tablet or laptop, you should never use all the cores for mining. That way the device doesn't run as hot as when running on all cores... What matters is finding the right pool to mine on, as some pools have lousy returns and others have better... You need to count the number of blocks found and divide it by the hours the pool has been online. Most ETN pools have statistics pages that give the numbers to use for that calculation. Normal rate of blocks is 30 per hour for whole network and closer you get to that, the better the pool is.
good point @mtl1979 It's never a good idea to run all cores for any task and you're right some mining pools perform much better than others. I think my point was that there's a very small profit to be had from using your own regular kit. my laptop is a really nice machine and I wouldn't want to use it to make a few pennies with, while shortening it's life span. I have older machines which I could use but it seems mining is a speculative business. the pennies may or may no turn into something bigger as the coins appreciate or depreciate along the way !! someone's gotta mine those coins tho'.
I'm mining on 5 low-end devices and that is barely profitable when I combine mining and trading.
well you never know, you might hit it lucky with some cheap mined coins which go boom later on. people were mining 100 bitcoins per day at one point when the network was in it's infancy ! that's £500,000k per day if you wind the clock forward to today
The problem currently is that I don't have enough coins to take big risks, so I miss some of ups and downs waiting for buy and sell limits to be filled. I can't deposit enough coins to HitBTC because they're doing technical maintenance and some coins are disabled. When the maintenance is over I should have about 4.60 USD worth of coins waiting to be deposited.
In case you don't know yet the phone mining will just be a simulation to get more people into crypto. It won't actually use your processor (apart from being an idle background task, I guess). Also the difficulty has gone down substantially since you wrote your article, so it may even be profitable on a laptop now.
Our first pool - ELECTRONEUM:
http://electroneum.miningpool.today/
Right now it's only useful for guys(or for a group) who can make block per day. And It's not needed to share your income with others.
Join ) And check!
This is always the confusing question. Being a network enthusiast anyway, I always have lots of high-powered things going, though I'd rather earn crypto through doing other forms of work rather than wasting electricity. Seems not worth it, even now. I do have the miner running for electroneum on my phone, though I think if I'm going to have my computer run any background tasks, I'm going to keep doing what I've been doing, which is contributing to the World Community Grid project. at leat I feel like I've helped accomplish something that way.