
Samsung Made a Bitcoin Mining Rig Out of Old Galaxy S5s - rayascott
https://motherboard.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/3kvdv9/samsung-upcycling-galaxy-s5-bitcoin-mining-rig
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soapdog
The rig is not the important part of this article. What is extremely cool is
Samsung supporting upcycling initiatives and going as far as having approved
ways of unlocking and replacing the OS in the devices with stuff such as
Ubuntu Core and others.

This could be huge! I believe a better title would be something related to the
upcycling project.

~~~
hathvi
This made me excited to see as well. Here's some more information for others
that may be interested.

[https://youtu.be/J1bK3TxdMeI](https://youtu.be/J1bK3TxdMeI)

Skip to 9 minutes for a more fluent english speaker that I found much easier
to follow. He mentions wiping Android, installing some base OS and using
Docker at 12:25 in the video.

The website [http://upcycling.io/](http://upcycling.io/)

~~~
CommanderData
This is a great idea from Samsung. A phone has everything needed to become a
useful IoT device.

But how would I connect sensors and other things to the phone?

~~~
ISKthrow
USB-OTG?

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Hasz
It looks like the Samsung rig is doing about 2600Kh/second at about 4W per
phone. This is a hash rate of 1538.46 J/GH.

In comparison, the Antminer S9 will do 13Th/sec for about 1275W. This gives a
hash rate of 0.098 J/GH.

In essence, an actual bitcoin miner is about 15,000 times more efficient. I'm
all for recycling, but this is not an effective solution.

Why not release the documentation for the displays for use in other products,
or release technical documentation for other parts of the board? This would be
a much better step in recycling instead of building an anemic space heater
with bitcoin.

~~~
PascLeRasc
I don't think the point was for other people to recreate a bitcoin miner - no
one will have 4+ S5s laying around to use anyway. It's just to show that they
still have some computation power that can be used.

~~~
CyberDildonics
But the post you are replying to is showing that they literally can't be used
for this.

~~~
colejohnson66
I think they quite literally _can_ be used that way. Practically? No.

~~~
dTal
They can mine bitcoin. They can't be _used_ for mining bitcoin. It proves
nothing whatsoever about the utility of old S5s, any more than this[1] shows
that old 60s mainframes "still have some power that can be used".

[1] [http://www.righto.com/2015/05/bitcoin-mining-on-55-year-
old-...](http://www.righto.com/2015/05/bitcoin-mining-on-55-year-old-
ibm-1401.html)

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sxates
This is super cool! I was just thinking about what all you could use old
phones for, and they could easily replace a lot of existing devices.

Like Nest thermostats and cameras - there's no reason those devices couldn't
be replaced by old phones running custom software, instead of buying purpose
built hardware that costs $150+. My old iPhone4 is just as capable hardware-
wise as a nest cam - so why can't I turn it into that?

Amazon Echo Show - that could just be an old phone docked to a speaker base.

Smart Light Switches - phone on the wall.

Dedicated alarm clock - old phone on the night stand.

Host device for chromecasts or AppleTV? Old phones have more than enough
power, they just need an HDMI output adapter.

Lots of possibilities, especially with something like their bitcoin rig that
ties a bunch of devices together for more horsepower.

~~~
khedoros1
I know I've used old phones as baby monitors, wifi cameras, Roku and soundbar
remote controls, alarm clocks, and streaming video clients. And all that was
just using regular Android versions. But I could imagine using an old phone as
a wireless print server, or something. That would be pretty cool.

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nasalgoat
I can't imagine such a rig could effectively mine any coins. As a proof of
concept it's cute but its actual utility seems dubious.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
I think you are missing the forest through the trees. The point is that there
is significant computational power inside your old smartphone, which could be
used for many different things. The bitcoin mining is simply illustrating this
and showing how it is more computationally efficient than a desktop/labtop.

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mplewis
Is the author conflating "cryptocurrency" with "Bitcoin?" These devices' CPUs
might be able to mine Monero, but definitely will not be able to mine Bitcoin
without losing money on power.

~~~
freehunter
I don't think Samsung is worried about how much money they'll make from it,
rather that is's a cool engineering project.

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Theodores
A manufacturer could make it easy for everyone if the day after the warranty
expired a pop-up gave you the option to carry on using your device with
whatever updates happen, install stock Android or install stock Ubuntu. They
could even charge extended warranty or for updates to their version of an
operating system so long as the option was there to use your device the FOSS
way.

Old phones could become the standard device replacing things like the
Raspberry Pi if it was that easy to switch them over to post-warranty FOSS
mode. Even better would be if this upcycling was a requirement, so out of
warranty devices could default to being a compute device with well defined
interfaces to cameras and sensors. The EU could pass laws to enforce
'upcycling' standards so all electronics is not waste but has at least some
usable compute capability even if thermally inefficient or with latency
issues.

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yuhong
ARMv8 includes optional AES extensions and Monero already has code for it.

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bazizbaziz
Reminds me of this paper: [https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/25/towards-
deploying-decomm...](https://blog.acolyer.org/2017/08/25/towards-deploying-
decommissioned-mobile-devices-as-cheap-energy-efficient-compute-nodes/)

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giomasce
One thing manufacturers could do to reduce waste would be to make phones less
locked in the first place.

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soperj
"Old" Galaxy S5s.... and I'm still using my G3

~~~
freehunter
Just because someone is still using it doesn't mean it's not old. It's three
versions behind current, so that seems to fit the definition.

~~~
soperj
Yeah, I'd never use firefox 54. Blasphemy.

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srcmap
I have a few old android phones laying around.

I have two app idea:

write motion activated camera app that stores motion activated pictures on
google drive - special folder. Only me and my family have access to that
google drive folder. Files will be deleted from that folder after N days.

    
    
       --- Turn your old phones to security camera.APP
    
    

Or another app can do time lapse pictures convert to movie where I can mounted
on car's dash board and turn 1-2 hours trip into 10-20 seconds clip.

What do you guys think? Good, bad, there is an app for that already?

Any other idea?

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
I believe there are already apps for that.

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bitmapbrother
I really don't see the point of this. The mining power is so low it wouldn't
even be worth the cost to operate. Samsung should focus on updating ALL of
their current devices with OS and security updates rather than replacing them
with another OS and not updating the drivers or firmware when they get bored
of it. Their flagship devices are still not on a monthly security patch
cadence and they treat their low and mid range phones as if they don't even
exist.

