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,