What to do with old smartphones but still have conditions to use? The Samsung has a program called Upcycling that stimulates the development of applications based on devices not in use. One of the projects presented recently makes the Galaxy S5 – the top of the brand in 2014 – mining bitcoins (or other crypto-currency). It’s just not easy to replicate the idea: 40 model units were used.
Minerar bitcoins consists essentially of processing information that is part of the blockchain – the book that records all crypto-currency transactions. This activity is rewarded with quotas of the digital currency itself. The problem is that this is a complex procedure and requires a lot of hardware, which is why it is difficult to obtain gains from mining today.
C-Lab, a team of engineers responsible for creative projects within Samsung , did not present the work as a proven cost-effective mining solution. But the tests suggest that with proper refinements, the idea may actually become feasible
Basically, the C-Lab people set up a sort of tower-shaped hub and put the 40 used units of the Galaxy S5 there. However, the most important ingredient of the invention is software specifically developed for interconnecting the apparatus and performing mining.
As information is scarce, it is unclear how the system works, but a board next to the device reported that each group of eight units of the Galaxy S5 had more energy efficiency in mining than a desktop with Core i7-2600 processor – not that desktops are indicated for this purpose; Today, mining is practically an activity on an “industrial scale.”
In any case, Samsung is talking about publicly releasing the software from this and other smartphone reuse projects. Among the other ideas presented in Upcycling are a Galaxy Tab tablet turned into a kind of laptop with Ubuntu and a Galaxy S3 that turned aquarium monitor.