With the ever-increasing popularity of smartphones, the speed of hardware updates of individual models also increases in direct proportion. In simple terms, you could say that the phone that you took out of the box a few weeks ago as brand new is actually already old today, figuratively speaking of course. At the same time, even older smartphones, which accumulate unstoppably, have sufficient performance that can be used for the vast majority of operations. And it was Samsung that came up with an interesting solution to utilize these seemingly old, but in fact still powerful devices. He assembled a bitcoin mining tower from them.
Scientists from Samsung C-Lab took 40 pieces Galaxy S5s, which are no longer even in production these days, and built a bitcoin mining rig out of them. They uploaded a new operating system to all the phones, which is specially designed for mining, giving them new life and use. According to the developers, even eight used phones are more energy efficient than one computer, and that's why their mining platform is more advantageous. However, no one is mining bitcoin on desktop computers these days because it's simply inconvenient.
But the Bitcoin mining rig wasn't the only thing the C-Lab team boasted about. As part of his focus on breathing new life into old phones instead of taking them apart and reusing them, he has also devised other methods of recycling. For example, an old tablet Galaxy turned by engineers into a laptop powered by the Ubuntu operating system. For the old man Galaxy S3 then prepared a system that, with the help of other sensors, served informace about life in an aquarium. In the end, they used an old phone that they programmed to recognize faces and hid it in an owl-shaped decoration that they hung by the front door.
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source: motherboard
