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Samsung Made a Bitcoin Mining Rig Out of 40 Old Galaxy S5s (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Samsung is starting a new "Upcycling" initiative that is designed to turn old smartphones and turn them into something brand new. Behold, for example, this bitcoin mining rig, made out of 40 old Galaxy S5 devices, which runs on a new operating system Samsung has developed for its upcycling initiative. Samsung premiered this rig, and a bunch of other cool uses for old phones, at its recent developer's conference in San Francisco. Upcycling involves repurposing old devices instead of breaking them down for parts of reselling them. The people at Samsung's C-Lab -- an engineering team dedicated to creative projects -- showed off old Galaxy phones and assorted tablets stripped of Android software and repurposed into a variety of different objects. The team hooked 40 old Galaxy S5's together to make a bitcoin mining rig, repurposed an old Galaxy tablet into a ubuntu-powered laptop, used a Galaxy S3 to monitor a fishtank, and programed an old phone with facial recognition software to guard the entrance of a house in the form of an owl. Samsung declined to answer specific questions about the bitcoin mining rig, but an information sheet at the developer's conference noted that eight galaxy S5 devices can mine at a greater power efficiency than a standard desktop computer (not that too many people are mining bitcoin on their desktops these days).
So?
It seems the trend these days is to use someone else's.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
not that too many people are mining bitcoin on their desktops these days
not that too many people are knowingly mining bitcoin on their desktops these days
OMG! !It contains #blockchain!
It must be #news!
Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?
Slashdot, get to the 21st century!
Or actually, it would suffice, if you'd get to October 1991!
"not that too many people are mining bitcoin on their desktops these days"
Um... you sure?
NiceHash runs on two of my PCs right now... their main usage is not mining rigs, but they earn their keep while I'm not using them. Making about 6 bucks a day before electricity cost, using about 500W of power.
Plenty other little fellas like me, making a buck.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I feel like the reuse for stuff like this is honestly better than trying to break them down for scrap. I'd be curious how easily the application could be repurposed for stuff like folding@home, seti@home, or other community distributed analysis efforts.
Also curious how readily you could add different phones into the collective. Is it easy with just homogeny or could mix and match work just fine (even within just Samsung)?
Why not cure cancer instead?
The fire at Samsung's C-Lab was so intense, that witnesses stated the flames were turning white hot. No survivors have been found, and Captain Hazel "Hank" Murphy, who was not at the C-Lab at the time of the fire, says that he told the crew to not use all 40 at once.
A fast CPU will generate ~0.25Mh/s. That CPU is approximately 40 times faster than an s5, so 0.00625 Mh/s. A typical ASIC box can generate 4.3Th/s. So That's 4,300GH/s or 4,300,000 Mh/s. So a single ASIC box, commercially available for less than a grand, can mine the same amount of coins per day as 688,000,000 galaxy s5s. Wikipedia say they sold 12 million galaxy s5's in the first 3 months. Let's assume that's 1/3rd the amount the ever made. That mean's a single ASIC (Antminer s7) can mine 19 times more a day than every samsung galaxy s5 in existence today. It'll do all that on 1600W, while the galaxy s5's at a very conservative 5w each, would require 3.4GW. For scale, the Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona has three nuclear reactors and has the largest combined electricity generating capacity of nuclear reactors in the US at about 3.9 GW
How many Mhash do we get per Joule of energy spent? If it can't compete with ASIC miners on this, there is absolutely no point in doing it (other than juicy Slashdot headlines, of course)
Quantum hacker.
So why don't they provide a tinkerers dev kit for everyone with old devices then? This is kind of rubbing our faces "in it", isn't it?
repurposed an old Galaxy tablet into a ubuntu-powered laptop
Why the fuck can't they make a normal Linux tablet from day one if they can repurpose an old one? What kind of idiocy is that?
Ezekiel 23:20
For once, reading TFA would have been useful to a lot of people here, including myself.
There's a photo with a graph in it:
Bitcoin mining cluster
CPU mining comparison with desktop PC
PC i7-2600, hash rate 20000, 95 watts
Galaxy S5, hash rate 2600, 4 watts
Power efficiency
PC i7-2600, 211 Khash/watt
Galaxy S5, 650 Khash/watt
Can any of these compete with ASICs? No. But they can still participate in a pool.
They could also mine something else like Dogecoin, Litecoin or Monero.
#DeleteFacebook
mining coal to power old phones to "mine" fake money
I've been "upcycling" my SGS3 for years now using it as our family primary smart Music player in the living room. But this "upcycling" initiative really grids my gears, because Samsung has locked it's phones to ancient versions of Android, making them artificially obsolete and insecure. So on the one hand they're artificially making hardware obsolete, and on the other hand they're pushing their old hardware for stupid ideas like bitcoin mining. I know people that have a drawer of old smartphones and still wasted $50 on a Google Mini. Off the top of my head, can think of so many better uses than mining.
* Dedicated home VoIP phone
* Home Music player
* Home Media player
* Google Mini / Echo Dot
Most old smartphone are perfectly capable of any of the above, especially if manufactures unlocked them to allow CyanogenMod/LineageOS
Both Amazon Alexa and (soon) Google Home support video-capable devices and have opened up for the creation of third-party devices. The speakers aren't great in these devices, but they'd be a very cost-effective means of expanding Alexa and Google Home to other rooms.
Of course, you won't get this from Samsung because it would compete with their own offerings.
Woke up this morning and this is the first headline I read. I read it as:
"Samsung Made a Bitcoin Mining Rig Out of 40 year-old Galaxy S5s"
Thought I had overslept.
Yes, of course, repurpose old HW, great idea, except that they are actually locked down specifically so that you can not repurpose them.
Real life is overrated.
I've been trying to use old phones for various things, but run into problems with some of them. As in they won't power up without a battery installed, which eventually gets overcharged and blows up like a balloon. Anyway around that?
"Old phones?!?!"
I have a Samsung Galaxy S5 featured in the story - It's still working well. It's 4G LTE, has a removeable battery and microSD card slot and takes great pictures. It's running Android 6.
Why would I "upcycle" it? (Whatever that means.)
Sony has been an exceptionally good citizen wrt repurposing smartphones, see here among other places (yes, other Sony divisions did bad things in the past, but not related to phones afaik).
Google Nexus devices are also in Linux mainline.
Vote with your wallet.
Fuck