Saad Ullah
Mobile Mining
The people at HTC never seem to run out of steam. They have been breaking grounds with HTC’s flagship mobile, the Exodus. A blockchain enabled mobile, it has a built in wallet to store cryptocurrencies and supports dApps. Now, HTC has turned its eyes towards using the mobile for crypto miningby partnering up with Mida Labs. Using the mining specific DeMiner App, users of the Exodus will be able to use their mobile to mine Monero by the end of the second quarter of 2020.
Normally, the concept of mining today brings into the mind huge arrays or farms of dedicated computers and processors that eat through a significant amount of energy to create new blocks and coins. However, Midas Lab and HTC claim that the DeMiner app has been designed to be efficient enough so that the Exodus mobile can be used to mine the privacy focused cryptocurrency, Monero.
Speaking on the reason why users of Exodus were now being offered the option to mine, Decentralized Chief Officer of HTC, Phil Chen said,
At HTC, our position is to use the mobile phone to drive further decentralization. The mobile phone has become the primary computing device of the people and making it accessible to everyone empowers the people.” and, “In other words, the question is not should we use an ASIC or a CPU. The question is how can we further decentralize and ensure a more inclusive monetary system?
Competing With Farms
Chen further defended the use of mobile devices for mining and operating decentralized networks. According to him, the year 2020 will see move than 3.6 billion mobile devices in use. Using these as nodes and miners will ensure that hash rate and mining power of blockchain networks remain decentralized.
Dr. Jri Lee, the CEO of Midas Labs, is also against the use of large mining farms and advocates smaller and compact devices to be used, spread over different users, ensuring true decentralization,
Cryptocurrency mining should never be limited to centralized farms or giant miners. Mining on mobile or other personal devices perfectly meets the main spirit of blockchain, i.e., decentralization. Today, the most valuable cryptocurrencies are still based on proof of work. That is, mining is the indispensable part of these cryptocurrencies.
Monero uses a specialized algorithm called Random X that is large mining farm resistant and more household CPU friendly. This makes it a good choice for Exodus mobile as a mining operation. Users of Exodus will be able to mine around USD 0.0038 worth of XMR per day, with average running cost of the mining app less than half of that. Monero is a privacy focused cryptocurrency that has come under fire recently for its ability make it hard for tracing where a holder has received the tokens from.
Saad Ullah
