Vitalik Buterin Criticized Monero Mining Cell Phones

Vitalik Buterin criticized the latest collaboration between Midas Labs and HTC that allow Monero Mining with cell phones. According to him, it would take about 40 years to complete mining 1 full XMR with the HTC mining application. In the following Monero news, we find out more about the mining application.

There was a discussion about the cooperation between HTC and Midas Labs which allows the users of the HTC Exodus phone to mine Monero coins. The Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin criticized the initiative on his Twitter account. The cooperation between the two companies was initially announced on April 10 and allows mining Monero with the DeMiner application. The application allows mining directly from the phone because of the low consumption levels. The founder of Midas Labs Jri Lee said about the app:

‘’Midas Labs empowers EXODUS 1S users to mine at least $0.0038 of XMR per day on average, while the electricity cost is less than 50% of that. Midas Labs will deepen the process of decentralization by providing hardware-related solutions for the mobile industry. Midas is excited to collaborate with Exodus to enable an even greater user-friendly environment for blockchain enthusiasts.’’

The critics of the cooperation claimed that it would take up to 40 years to mine 1 Monero with the application and they pointed out that the mining profitability with the application is low and inefficient. The estimations are that it would take a century to replace the initial investment that was made with the cell phone or other equipment. Vitalik Buterin commented:

‘’Mining on phones is a fool’s game. Goes against everything we know about hardware economies of scale and more likely to trick users with false hope than help them.’’

Buterin proposed that the users should stake because staking with cell phones is promising to contrast the mining but some of the users are questioning the objectivity of Buterin because ETH is in the process of transitioning from PoW to PoS. The user VladCostea was one of the first critics of Buterin and PoS who asked about the advantages of PoS over PoW, pointing out that the Proof of Stake method will only ‘’enrich the rich.’’ Buterin responded:

‘’As though PoW is some virtuous act of working with blood and sweat and not largely just sitting around waiting for hardware (that you bought because you’re rich) to make you even richer.’’