Mobile Bitcoin Mining Isn’t Worth The Effort, Unless You’re a Cybercriminal

Trying to mine for bitcoins using mobile devices won’t become an industry trend anytime soon, except for cybercriminals hijacking unsuspecting users.

Even if cybercriminals hijack smartphones and tablets, which has been noted in the past few months by security researchers, it still will be a slow, tedious process.  Devices hijacked with a mining Trojan tend to run hotter, battery levels drop significantly faster, and phone performance drags to a crawl, which is when users will likely notice the problem.

Using a single Samsung Galaxy SIII smartphone mining for 24 hours earns just .00000007 bitcoin – and it’d take more than 14 million devices to mine a single bitcoin each day, according to security firm Lookout.

Here is what Olaf Carlson-Wee, Operations at Coinbase, recently noted:

“To make mobile mining profitable, phones would need more powerful processors at a cheap cost.  Even if this were the case, mobile phones will never compete with hardware specifically designed to mine efficiently, like bitcoin ASICs (application specific integrated circuits).”

Mining for bitcoins effectively takes a mix of computer hardware, time and electricity to make it successful – and it will remain a difficult business model to adapt.

Criminals will continue hijacking PCs and mobile devices to steal banking information, conduct click fraud schemes, and compromise users to demand ransoms.  However, security experts still recommend users be aware of mining threats, and run anti-malware and anti-virus solutions on PCs and mobile devices.

Thank you to Lookout for providing us with this information

Image courtesy of New Bitcoin World