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Mining Bitcoin or other crypto on an iPhone gets you nowhere

by Daniel Petrov / Dec 22, 2017, 3:20 AM

This whole shebang nets you about $156 a year, not counting electricity

Remember the Bitcoin craze? How can you forget it, it's still going on. If you can't afford to buy a Bitcoin, and are not satisfied with owning a virtual fraction instead of the whole ephemera, you might have thought about mining cryptocurrency as an alternative. You got the newest iPhone X, 8 or 8 Plus, and those have A11 processors inside that all benchmarks agree are above and beyond anything currently on mobile, so can't they be put to better use, right?

Wrong, as, despite the proliferation of "mining" apps, those usually are ad-laden scams, or developer exercises so convoluted to install and manage, that you could waste a date making a run at crypto. Take MobileMiner, for instance, which is apparently one of the good ways to dig for virtual gold. It requires prepackaged sources downloaded off GitHub, and installed with the help of Xcode and the iOS App Signer. Needless to say, these last two need you to also sign as an Apple developer. Then comes a wallet config requirement from your cryptocurrency of choice, and afterwards you can be on your merry way mining. How much loot will the whole exercise bring?

Well, apart from the fact that keeping the app running in the background will make your phone all hot and bothered, and kill your battery in a few hours flat, the virtual haul seems to be... $13... a month... if you dig at night, too. Not really worth it, but inquiring minds wanted to know how can they make the iPhone X a money maker not a money taker. Well, mining crypto is not it, so earn the 40 daily cents by taking a Grande instead of Venti Frappuccino at the Starbucks counter, your heart will be better for it.

source: 9to5Mac

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10 Comments

1. notfair

Posts: 719; Member since: Jan 30, 2017

Hahahhaha,who can be that stupid to try to mine with the phone....

posted on Dec 22, 2017, 4:13 AM 0

2. Joms_US

Posts: 200; Member since: Oct 02, 2016

Haha well the iFappers including GB fools think A11 has desktop-class performance so. =D In normal world, A11 is just a tiny fraction (maybe 1/10th) of x86 performance.

posted on Dec 22, 2017, 5:02 AM 9

4. daniyal_05

Posts: 93; Member since: Nov 15, 2017

IphoneX with a11 is such a underperforming phone when it comes to sales

posted on Dec 22, 2017, 6:06 AM 1

7. mikehunta727 unregistered

Over 7 million in the 1st two weeks is the opposite of underperforming

posted on Dec 22, 2017, 10:06 AM 0

5. bucknassty

Posts: 1325; Member since: Mar 24, 2017

havent yall heard of the app that was used to mine coins when peoples phones were on the charger? it might have even been a phonearean article last year. some app used thousands of phones to mine coins which i think is a brilliant idea, but i can see the downside as peoples phones were extremely hot and potentially life threatening.

posted on Dec 22, 2017, 7:16 AM 0

3. Boast_Rider

Posts: 534; Member since: Sep 14, 2017

Get an RX Vega 56 or an Antminer S9 if you seriously want to mine. Also, thanks for making our transactions possible.

posted on Dec 22, 2017, 5:25 AM 0

6. tokuzumi

Posts: 1865; Member since: Aug 27, 2009

Depends on the compromises on the phone. If you can keep the phone plugged in while at work/home, then $40/month doing nothing sounds like some easy-ish free money. On my Android phone, I use Mobile Performance Meter. It pays me $0.10/day just for having my phone connected to a carrier's network. I take a survey and it pays me $0.50. I can then cash that out into things like Amazon gift cards. I spend maybe 2 minutes a month using the app. I'm not going to get rich off that app, but it's no effort for me.

posted on Dec 22, 2017, 9:01 AM 0

8. Sania

Posts: 97; Member since: Nov 04, 2017

Actually it depends on the coin. If the network difficulty is very low, you can actually mine with your phone. Minergate for example, allows you to mine tons of coins from some of the already dead or abandoned coin with very low to non-existent net diff. Some say, a dead coin can rise from the grave...

posted on Dec 22, 2017, 12:35 PM 0

10. cncrim

Posts: 1586; Member since: Aug 15, 2011

Yes it can. Just keep in mine that there are 1440 different crytocurrency now, and 99% of them will die 1% will remain. Same thing back in the day yahoo is big back in the day and google is no body. And what happen now?