How to mine cryptocurrency on your phone: A complete guide!
After a few weeks of experimenting, I think I've finally got this down. Do you have an old phone lying around and want to make some cryptocurrency with it? Here's how, based on my own tests and experiences. I've tried to present this in a way that anyone can start mining with relatively little issues!
You'll need any phone with a somewhat modern version of Android (4 or over should do). Any Android phone sold in the last 5 years should suffice.
First, we need to decide what to mine. With NiceHash's downfall, Vertcoin (VTC) has become a somewhat viable option. However, with the halving coming up soon, VTC is probably not the best long-term option for phone mining. I have found the two best cryptocurrencies to Android mine to be Monero (XMR) and Bytecoin (BCN).
In terms of shear profitability, Monero is the way to go. You'll get the most profit of essentially any current CPU-mineable coin, and the price of XMR has been going up in general. However, there are several reasons why I actually don't personally mine XMR. The first is transaction fees. If your only miner is a phone or two, a transaction fee of 0.01 XMR to withdraw your Monero will end up taking away months of mining time just to withdraw your money. The second reason not to mine XMR on phones is minimum payout. All XMR pools have a minimum payout set, and the lowest I have been able to find is 0.1 XMR. Since phones will produce anywhere from 5 H/s on lower end hardware (dual-core) up to over 50 H/s on state-of-the-art phones, reaching this minimum payout will take an enormous amount of time and you won't be able to cash out any of your profits. With the risk of a pool getting hacked or the XMR difficulty skyrocketing, this is a large risk I am unwilling to take.
...which is why I brought up our second option: Bytecoin. Bytecoin, like XMR is a cryptonight currency, and to be frank I am much less certain about its success in the future than I am about XMR. But: Bytecoin is very, very cheap and has almost zero transaction fees. You can currently pick up 1 BCN for under 20 satoshis. While the overall profitability is slightly lower than that for mining XMR, mining BCN will allow you to get regular payouts at your favorite pool (I use bytecoin.party, which pays out every 50 BCN. If you run your phones alongside a CPU you can get really regular payments!). However, by mining BCN, you are giving up some of your profits, since mining XMR strictly makes you more money if you can reach the payout minimum.
Once you've made your choice of currency, it's time to mine! Here's a step-by-step guide on how to do it:
Clear off any apps you don't need and run a storage cleaner program to make sure that you have as much free space as possible so that the phone will run smoother and be less prone to crashes. This is much more important on low-end hardware.
Install one of the following apps: AAMiner, Neoneominer. The reason I don't recommend the Minergate app is because I found it far less stable than the above two miners. They do include ads, but these shouldn't interfere with much. I'm sure there are other apps out there, but I have personally tested both of these and find them to work well.
Create a wallet for your chosen currency. Since I mine BCN, I will be using it as the example for the rest of the tutorial. If you choose XMR, just do everything the same way but with a XMR wallet. The important thing here is to obtain a receiving address.
Find out your chosen mining pool's IP and port number. For me, I input pool.bytecoin.party:3333 (Port 3333 because I am using low end hardware). Your mining pool's website will have more details on what address to use.
For worker name, you will typically put your BCN/XMR address (unless your pool tells you otherwise). Your password will typically be "x".
Select which coin/algorithm you want. If you have the option to select your exact currency, do that. If only mining algorithms are shown, XMR/BCN will both use Cryptonote/Cryptonight.
Press start and begin mining! Make sure your miner is working by examining whether or not you get a hashrate after a minute or two. Your phone is now submitting shares to your mining pool and passively earning you income.
IMPORTANT: Do not allow your phone to overheat. Overheating is very bad. If your phone gets too hot, charging may become disabled (causing your mining software to stop, or your phone to stop charging and eventually die and have to be manually restarted), your phone may crash and have to be restarted, or your hashrate may drastically decrease. You can cool your phone easily by putting it in a ventilated area. If you are lucky enough to live on a university campus like me, you can just run a fan over the phone(s) and enjoy that free electricity! On that note, be sure to calculate out your expected profits and ensure that you aren't spending more on electricity than you are earning, although at this stage almost any phone should turn a profit.
...And that's it! Don't expect very much, but if you have old phones lying around (Do not buy phones for this, you will not profit!) this can definitely be worth it, and a very easy way to grab some extra crypto to play with. BCN and XMR are both widely traded on many exchanges so it is very easy to get them traded for any other coin. You can even display something on the screen of the phone and hang it on the wall: Another steem post here described using a phone miner as a clock. I personally want to set up a BTC/LTC/VTC price ticker on one of my phone miners.
My fan-ventilated miners (I have 7 (?) now, I think) typically only need to be checked on every 2 or 3 days and I've already produced a payout solely from the phones without the help of my computer's GPU.
I hope someone is able to benefit from this information! I plan to eventually figure out a way to further automate this by auto-booting the miners when the phone starts (which would make crashes irrelevant). Let me know if anyone has any more tips of phone/low-end hardware cryptomining.
Thanks for reading!