Cryptocurrency is distinguished from fiat money by the absence of a single digital bank and control over transactions and payments. It is stored and maintained in a decentralized manner, that is, on the wallets of millions of users around the world. If the bank is responsible for accounting for ordinary money, then in the case of, for example, Bitcoin, the blockchain is responsible for this, which contains records of all transactions ever made.
Miners are rewarded for supporting the network, that is, combining transactions into blocks and calculating the key (hash) for the block. That is, people generate keys and try them until one fits. If earlier it could be done using a regular home PC, now it requires much more power. Mining Bitcoins using the SHA-256 algorithm requires so much performance from the equipment that even the most powerful processors are far from the past. And with the advent of ASIC chips, video cards are slowly starting to lose ground.
Nowadays people practically do not let mobile gadgets out of their hands, so despite the growing difficulty of obtaining cryptocurrencies, developers have come up with how to mine crypto on phones. In this regard, the question arises, is it really possible to mine cryptocurrency on a smartphone? In principle, this is possible, although we can only talk about coins that differ significantly from "digital gold" in terms of the characteristics of their production.
First of all, we are talking about mining on Android-based CryptoNight algorithm (derived from CryptoNote). These include Monero (XMR), Bytecoin (BCN), and Digital Note (XDN). You can also try mining currencies such as Dash (DASH), Aeon (AEON), QuazarCoin (QCN), Fantom (FTM), MonetaVerde (MCN), or new little-known coins on your Android phone after they are added to applications.
Popular apps for mobile crypto mining
MinerGate
This miner is a specialized pool that gives a chance to earn some crypto on a PC, tablet or mobile phone. The pool program distributes tasks between participants to combine their computing capabilities into a single network.
Mining can be done via Wi-Fi or a mobile network. In the settings, you should set that mining can only be done via Wi-Fi or only when the phone is recharging. It is also possible to set the number of cores used for mining and prohibit operation if the battery charge is low. The device does not heat much during the extraction process.
The calculation speed is low. It depends on the power of the smartphone and can vary quite widely, for example, on one (budget) gadget you can get 9 H/s, and on another (more expensive) — 17 H/s. But in any case, this is 10–20 times less than the average hand of a personal computer. You can earn about 10–12 BCN per day — 0.0015 USD.
ARM Mineral
This is one of the best mining apps for Android/IOS in 2022. Not bolted to a specific pool, very simple interface.
In the free version, the user is shown a video advertisement of a binary options resource in full-screen format, it is impossible to disable it. The ad-free version is paid.
The mining speed is 2.8 kH/s on 4 cores, 3.2 kH/s on 8 cores. The SHA256 and Scrypt algorithms do not run, the earnings for the rest are too small. At the same time, there is noticeable heating and unstable operation of the device under load.
Is it worth it?
Before mining on an iPhone or Android, you should ask yourself how appropriate it is to do this. Calculating the hashes of cryptocurrency blocks requires a serious and long-term load on the device, for which smartphones are not designed at all.
The fact is that the phones do not have an active cooling system, and passive cooling does not provide a normal heat sink. This leads to rapid wear of the device.
It should be noted that all the tests did not take into account the cost of used electrical energy and the wear and tear of equipment. If we take into account these factors, the income from mobile mining will not be comparable with the costs.
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