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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).
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
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
The computers make 6 dollars per day and require 8 dollars of electricity per day, but he's making it up on volume!
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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.
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Your analysis is completely incorrect. Trying to say that chip density tells the story and that your desktop used less power than a smartphone because it has greater chip density is absurd. In fact greater chip density means the same die space can use more power, not less.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I'm well aware of the uselessness of the setup. You are creating a straw man again. The OP claimed that an assumption was made that wasn't made. You went on for paragraphs making a completely flawed analysis of an entirely seperate issue. Nobody is saying "abandon your mining rig plans and do it this way instead."
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Actually NiceHash mines whatever coin's more profitable at the moment and converts it automatically to BTC. It's all transparent to me.
Of course, manually mining some more obscure coin and converting it exactly at the right time might prove maybe twice as profitable, but I value my own time more than the difference. Auto is good enough. I'm not doing this to become rich, and it's a long term investment. If BTC reaches very high values sometime down the road, I could become rich. If it crashes, it won't make me any poorer because the investments would have had written themselves off a long time ago.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)