How to mine bitcoin and cryptocurrencies with mobile phones

 

How to Make Money Mining Bitcoin on Android

Solo Mining on Android

So just how hard is it to make money mining cryptocurrency on a smartphone? It depends. You’re not going to have much luck with Bitcoin — the exponential rise in popularity (one Bitcoin is worth $8,347.98 as of publication time) has made it an attractive target for crypto mining entrepreneurs. Every Bitcoin has a cryptographically generated 64-bit address, and a public key and private key that unlocks that address — that’s what’s generated by Bitcoin miners. But Bitcoin has a hard-coded currency unit limit of 21 million, and the current difficulty is such that most phones will take months to generate a fraction of a Bitcoin.

The Best Cryptocurrency & Bitcoin Mining Apps For Android

Now that we’ve established the best approach for mining cryptocurrency on Android, the next step is installing a cryptocurrency mining app that’ll automate the process. These Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Monero mining apps for Android automatically download pending transactions from the blockchain and put your phone’s processor to work, uploading the work when it’s complete.

MinerGate Mobile Miner

MinerGate

MinerGate Mobile Miner, a smartphone spin-off of the popular MinerGate cryptocurrency mining client for desktop PCs, is extraordinarily user-friendly (minus the occasional pop-up advertisement or two). It supports Monero, Bitcoin, Bytecoin, Dashcoin, DigitalNote, FantomCoin, Infinium-8, MonetaVerde, and QuazarCoin, and it’s one of the few cryptocurrency mining apps with a built-in wallet for storing generated coins, a cryptocurrency price-checking tool, miner chatrooms. It also makes it easy to withdraw coins to MinerGate’s cryptocurrency exchange, Changelly.com

After you create an account with MinerGate, which is mandatory, you’re presented with two options: Mobile Mining or Buy Cloud Mining. The first uses your phone’s system-on-chip to mine cryptocurrency, and the second offloads the processing to MinerGate’s servers for a nominal fee. The former option’s the better bet; given cryptocurrency mining’s razor-thin margins, cloud mining is rarely worth the associated surcharges. Unfortunately, MinerGate offers only cloud-based mining for Bitcoin and Monero.

Crypto Miner

Crypto Miner

Crypto Miner might not have MinerGate’s slickness and polish, but it supports a larger number of cryptocurrencies and algorithms, including Bitcoin, Litecoin, Yacoin, Quarkcoin, Groestlcoin, DiamondCoin Evolution v 2.0, Monero, Helixcoin, Skeincoin, and many others. (Not all algorithms are available in the free version; you’ll have to purchase access to individual algorithms if you opt not to shell out $2.28 for the Pro app.) It’s also optimized for NEON, ARM’s advanced SIMD (single instruction multiple data) architecture extension for Cortex-A processors, and requires that you join a mining pool.

Crypto Miner keeps things simple. Once you enter your mining pool credentials and select an algorithm from the drop-down menu, you’re free to specify the number of processor threads dedicated to the app’s decryption routine (only up to four, oddly, even on phones with eight-core processors). You’re also able to set the processing priority, and to choose whether the app’s allowed to run in the background or alert you of newly generated coins.

NeoNeonMiner

NeoNeonMiner

NeonNeon Miner, much like Crypto Miner, requires that you join a cryptocurrency mining pool. Among the list of cryptocurrencies supported are Bitcoin, Litecoin, Feathercoin, Vertcoin, and that just scratches the surface. The UI isn’t the prettiest, and the banner ads are a bit of an annoyance. But NeonNeonMiner offers a detailed cryptocurrency mining log and excellent autoconfiguration script that’ll detect most smartphone system-on-chips in seconds.

As far as the options are concerned, NeonNeonMiner is in line with other cryptocurrency mining apps for Android. You’re free to switch between mining pools at will, of course, as well as mining protocols/algorithms. And you can increase or decrease the number of processing threads across which the app will run when it’s confirming a transaction.

NeoNeonMiner

Price: Free 

AA Miner

AAMiner

If you’re looking for a no-frills, bare-bones cryptocurrency mining app that gets right down to business, AA Miner’s the app for you. It supports more than 50 cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Dash, Litecoin, FantomCoin, Bytecoin, and DigitalNote, and claims to offer the “most profitable mining” algorithm: CryptoNight. CryptoNight can be used to mine Monero, Bytecoin, and other altcoins.

AA Miner, like other cryptocurrency mining apps for Android, lets you specify the number of threads that’ll crunch cryptographic numbers. You also have the choice of allowing the app to run in the background, or to run only when plugged into a charger.

Pocket Miner

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If you don’t intend to switch between cryptocurrencies often, LitecoinPool.org’s Pocket Miner might be the mining app for you. It only supports one cryptocurrency, Litecoin, on LitecoinPool’s servers. You’re unlikely to find local system-on-chip mining profitable — short of an ASIC miner, it’ll take you months to generate enough Litecoin to pay for the electricity your phone consumes — but Pocket Miner plays nicely with cryptocurrency clients for desktops and custom mining rigs.

The settings menu is where you’ll find options for increasing or decreasing the processor thread count, selecting the server nearest you, and automatically stopping/starting mining when your phone’s charging, running low on battery, or connected to Wi-Fi.

Pocket Miner