Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: 21 Inc Confirms Plans for Mass Bitcoin Miner Distribution
by
davejh
on 19/05/2015, 12:28:45 UTC
I doubt they will be adding it on mobile phones.
It would dry the battery in no time.
It wouldn't be worth it.

It doesn't make sense on any device though. Always costs more to run than it's worth, plus requires consumers to do setup work to utilise what it does. I don't mind doing setup for my phone because I gain a lot from doing it, but what I don't get is why having BTC mining in my TV or a games console is interesting? What problem related to those devices does it solve? The funds aren't going to be large enough to do interesting micropayments. Even at 50 GH/s there's not enough BTC mined in a year to pay for a game or more than one or two TV episodes. Gets dramatically worse next year when the block reward drops to 12.5 BTC.

Unless there's going to be major adoption by users then the OEMs won't install the capability in their hardware because it costs them money (silicon, board space, software development and maintenance, customer service calls, retailer margin). There's a lot of commercial risk and highly questionable upside?