Discussion on mining apps & need more technical info
Hi Alex,
I found a number of bitcoin mining apps for Android that appear fake, e.g. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=miner.bitcoin.pro. They claim to do "cloud mining" and yield bitcoins for users. These apps stop "mining" and require users to click a button every 1~5 hours to "continue mining", for "security and stability reasons", when they display some ads. Some of these apps show unreasonable, and/or impossibly constant hash rates and earn rates, typical 6~12 sat/min, which I believe is improbable for a phone to achieve. I think the apps get most revenue from ads, rather than actual mining, and pay a part of it to users. That means in some sense watching ads is more profitable than mining on your phone.
I do hope your Bitcoin Miner is a legit mining app, which seems to be the case, given the CPU/GPU usage, the low yet reasonable earn rate, the absense of human intervention, and the convincing posts by the author on this forum. If that is the case I appreciate your efforts and honesty. However it seems that the app has not been improved much for years, depite the promises by the author on this forum. That can look suspicious but I hope it is just a limit of development efforts. The domain name is also weird. How is fabric related to bitcoin?
Anyway, there is apparently a lot of potential improvements for your app. For example, I do hope to see some more technical info, e.g. (a) the exact coin being mined (bitcoin does not use Scrypt), (b) explanations on how the yield is calculated since it does not mine bitcoin directly, (c) info on the mining pool (Is it standalone or part a larger pool? How big is it? What is it overall and average hash rate?), (d) allowing the user to close the ads temporarily, which can block the mining info.
Also, I am also trying MinerGate on Windows. It has a lot of choices of crypto currencies to mine, and seems to believe mining XMR is the most at the moment, for generic PCs. Have you considered mining potentiallly more profitable coins like XMR?
NS
NS
shared this idea
Bitcoin Miner has been discontinued. Please see https://www.groupfabric.com/pool/ for shutdown information.
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EmZee
commented
I've played around with a few BTC miners on Android and yep, they're pretty much all fake. One, had it paid out, would have earned me 1 BTC in about 2 weeks (yeah, right). Google Play has banned 'em all.
The one exception, actually, is Tweakly's MineMojo. They can't list it on the Play store, and they've had a few glitches (such as a hacking incident a few months back that destroyed their records) - but they're up and running again.
You have to sign up via Android (or an emulator) but then can mine on any device with a browser. I find that it slows my phone down far too much, but I have it running on a spare desktop and am getting 600-800 satoshi a day. Would be more but it's on the same machine I'm running GroupFabric's software on, so I have both dialed down a bit.
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AdminAlex
(CEO / Founder, GroupFabric)
commented
Also - to your comment on the Android app - our only release platform at the moment is the Windows Store but we are looking into Xbox and Android versions (after the user profitability work gets done). The Google Play and Apple stores do not allow on-device mobile mining so at best we'd have to offer an option via side-load.
Apps that do not perform on-device mining generally require the users to interact with ads, since otherwise no real value is being created.
We don't take any shortcuts - Bitcoin Miner is a real miner and AFAIK the only DirectX based miner out there (Microsoft only certifies DirectX for GPU operations on the Windows Store).
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AdminAlex
(CEO / Founder, GroupFabric)
commented
Hi NS, first thanks for the thoughtful comment.
The default pool in Bitcoin Miner is actually a multi-pool, where it has your miner mine whatever is most profitable for your PC/Phone, and then converts it over to Bitcoin.
We are working on adding more mining engines as right now as we don't have CryptoNight or Ethash cores which negatively affect yields As-is, users keep everything they mine as our app development is ad-supported (this is so we only do well if users want to run the application). While we don't charge fees because of this, some users have asked for an option to remove ads so we're also looking into seeing if we can offer that in the future for a small % of what is mined. Our first priority is improving mining yields for users however.
Our engineering team is fairly small - unfortunately that means that often we have to spend time on mining pool security and scalability work rather than the Bitcoin Miner app itself. This is something that isn't as visible as people only notice when something goes wrong.
As to the company name - the original focus was on something else before we launched Bitcoin Miner back in 2013, and have never bothered to change it as we've been mostly focused on the engineering rather than marketing!
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NS
commented
Another thing. I don't think the pool is that large, but users' earning variance seems low. Is the pool using PPS reward? Doesn't that bring the risk to the pool?