You Can Now Mine Cryptocurrency From Your iPhone – But Should You?

It’s now possible to mine certain cryptocurrency from your iPhone.  Yes, that’s correct.  You don’t necessarily need a large scale system of GPUs in order to get yourself some cryptocurrency.  All you need is your iPhone and an app called MobileMiner.  That seems a little fishy to me, but let’s explore nonetheless.  To start, what is MobileMiner? MobileMiner is a CPU miner for ARM64 iOS devices created by Elias Limneos, a jailbreak developer known for popular jailbreak tweaks like CallBar. What makes MobileMiner so interesting is that it’s extremely easy to configure and you can start mining directly from your iPhone, no jailbreak needed. All you need to do is build and deploy the project using Xcode (or download and install a precompiled build), obtain a wallet address, and start mining.

MobileMiner is a fork of LucasJones’ cpuminer-multi, which has been compiled with ARM64 iOS devices in mind. You can obtain MobileMiner directly from GitHub, and use it to build a project within Xcode for deploying to an iOS device of your choice.  Limneos recommends using more recent versions of the iPhone because their powerful CPUs produce the best hash rates.  Proceed at your own risk with this one though, as you are installing precompiled code on your iOS device.  You should also know that 1% of all mining profits go back to the developer.

Now that we know what it is, what does MobileMiner do?  MobileMiner is capable of mining cryptonote currencies, which is best done on a CPU, rather than a GPU, which makes it well suited for ARM64 iOS devices.  CryptoNote currencies include Bytecoin, Monero, Electroneum and a ton of others.

But there are some sources out there who are skeptical of this app.  Not because it doesn’t work, but because of the payout that you’re going to receive.  With MobileMiner you can mine cryptocurrency, but some are suggesting that you’re not going to make much more than $13 a month.  A month!  Which hardly seems worth it, if you think about what it’s going to do to your phone.

As I mentioned, you need to download these sources from GitHub and install those on your phone.  But, in order to perform all the install functions, you need to sign up as an Apple app developer.  You also have to configure a wallet from whatever cryptocurrency that you choose.  This entire process can be extremely time-consuming, and like I said, the payout is low.

You also have to keep in mind that this is using up your phone’s battery.  In fact, by letting this run you will kill your battery in only a few hours.  You can dig at night as well, but that $13 is all that you’re going to amass in a month.  Is that worth it to you? I like the idea of being able to mine cryptocurrency through your phone, but I don’t know that I like the idea of using my brand new iPhone X to do so.  I think that if the reward was bigger – even $100 a month, I would jump on this.  But because it’s currently so low, I’m a bit skeptical of it being worth it.