en.cryptonomist.ch
In a recent tweet, the founder of Ethereum (ETH), Vitalik Buterin, expressed a critical opinion on crypto mining via smartphone, referring to what HTC Exodus announced for Monero (XMR).
Mining on phones is a fool's game. Goes against everything we know about hardware economies of scale and more likely to trick users with false hope than help them.
*Staking* on phones, OTOH, is IMO quite promising…https://t.co/VGgkoHIDsP
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) April 13, 2020
By looking at the data that HTC has declared, it is possible to see how with the smartphone it would be feasible to recover about $0.0038 of XMR, which in a year it would be about $1.39 Monero, a rather ridiculous figure, especially when compared to the cost of the terminal (the HTC Binance Edition costs $700).
The profit would be practically non-existent and it would take more than 500 years to break even, which is why the founder of the Ethereum blockchain argues that such initiatives only give users false hopes.
In essence, it would be better to buy $700 of XMR or another crypto rather than directly mine it with hardware that wasn’t designed for this purpose.
A full blockchain node for total control of assets
Even if Buterin criticizes this type of smartphone associated with crypto mining, nevertheless there is a real chance for staking on smartphones, since it doesn’t require any particular resources and the cost/benefit ratio is definitely higher than the normal crypto mining.
In any case, the aspect of the decentralization of miners as distribution of both miners and nodes is an important concept to avoid the centralization of large mining pools that can actually change the fate of a blockchain.
HTC has also put on the market a 5G router that can run a full bitcoin node and provide the masses with a “plug & play” solution so as not to have to rely on external services to monitor their transactions.