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from the praise-me-for-fixing-what-i-broke dept.
news.bitcoin.com reports on a Samsung Initiative to repurpose older Samsung Galaxy devices rather than trash recycle them. From the article:
Samsung's new 'upcycling' initiative has seen the company repurpose outdated technology for novel and creative utilities, including the construction of a bitcoin mining rig from out of old smartphones. The 'Upcycling' Program Has Seen the Company Turn 40 Used Galaxy S5s Into a Bitcoin Mining Rig
[...] Samsung has reportedly claimed that eight Samsung Galaxy S5s can mine with superior energy efficiency compared to a standard desktop computer.
Of course in this age, GPU rigs are not even effective bitcoin miners, so beating a 'standard desktop' is complete nonsense. However, the later article has some actually interesting information:
Kyle Wiens, chief executive officer of iFixit – a company that is involved in repairing Galaxy S3s for Samsung's initiative – has given generous praise to the upcycling program. Wiens stated "what [Samsung] built is a layer between the hardware and you being able to install anything you want on it. It's a step lower than jailbreaking, it's removing Android entirely." Wiens describes the initiative... "the challenge with keeping old electronics running a long time is software," adding that "with phones in particular, the old software is insecure and doesn't run the new apps. So the question is, if you have this perfectly functional piece of hardware that doesn't have good software anymore and you want to keep it running for ten years, how do you do that?"
It is almost like this initiative would not even been needed if the hardware was not cryptographically locked down from running the owner's software of choice in the first place. At least there is this bit of relief:
The company has pledged to make plans for the showcased projects freely available online, in addition to the software that allowed Samsung's Creative Lab to unlock and repurpose old phones.
Anyone ready to place bets on whether the 'unlocking software' will be freely available or require onerous EULA acceptance?
Link to the Initiative: https://galaxyupcycling.github.io/
(Score: 3, Insightful) by lx on Wednesday November 01 2017, @06:26AM (6 children)
A cheap ploy to get old phones off the market.
Especially the bitcoin mining rig idea is ridiculous. Bitcoin is probably the least green new technology out there. It's a huge distributed machine burning fuel to generate smugness and greed. Compared to the bitcoin ecosystem traditional banking is a solar powered hippie community of tree huggers. Adding an underpowered cluster of phones to this adds no value.
Bitcoin energy consumption [digiconomist.net]
The green thing to do would be to build phones that aren't slowed down by bloatware and do not need replacing every year or two, but that would cut into profits.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday November 01 2017, @06:45AM (1 child)
At least the Bitcoin miners or oligarchists or whatever are moving towards rigs with greater megahashes per Joule [bitcoin.it] using ASICs or whatever. Whereas a Beowulf cluster of phones attempting the same thing will just suck ass. If it ends up not mining any coins during the lifetime of the hardware, that means its efficiency is infinitely worse, right?
You can also run Folding@home or BOINC on your old smartphone. Maybe get some infinitesimally small positive impact out of it. Or repurpose the thing as a home surveillance or dashboard camera or something. Just don't mine coins with it.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @08:41AM
It is informally called "Bitcoin mining" to mine a memory-hard algorithm like ETH or XMR, then convert to Bitcoin later.
I do hope that we get full hardware access, but suspect some things like the radio will be disabled. That may actually be an advantage if you are paranoid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @07:00AM (2 children)
Bitcoin is greener, overall.
(Score: 2) by lx on Wednesday November 01 2017, @07:34AM (1 child)
At the moment Bitcoin is still small relative to the banking sector, so the impact is limited. Still I have no doubt that the bitcoin ecosystem does facilitate large drug and arms deals. This is inherent in all financial systems.
I'm afraid that with growth, this cute little thing will grow to consume everything before it, eventually funding wars and crimes to keep it going.
Perhaps I've been playing that damn paperclip game too much.
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @01:15PM
So just like normal fiat currency then.
(Score: 3, Funny) by jcross on Wednesday November 01 2017, @07:41PM
I can think of one non-ridiculous use for it:
1. Set up a bitcoin mining rig made of Samsung phones in your basement.
2. Watch your house burn to the ground.
3. Collect that sweet sweet insurance money.
4. Profit!