Mining Engineering Commons^™

Cryptocurrency Mining On Mobile As An Alternative Monetization Approach, Nguyen Phan Sinh Huynh, Kenny Choo, Rajesh Krishna Balan, Youngki Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Can cryptocurrency mining (crypto-mining) be a practical ad-free monetization approach for mobile app developers? We conducted a lab experiment and a user study with 228 real Android users to investigate different aspects of mobile crypto-mining. In particular, we show that mobile devices have computational resources to spare and that these can be utilized for crypto-mining with minimal impact on the mobile user experience. We also examined the profitability of mobile crypto-mining and its stability as compared to mobile advertising. In many cases, the profit of mining can exceed mobile advertising's. Most importantly, our study shows that the majority (72%) of …