HTC’s blockchain phone takes over a century to mine enough crypto to pay for itself

HTC’s Exodus blockchain smartphones will soon receive their own mining app, letting them mine Monero cryptocurrency when plugged in and idle, The Block reported earlier this month. The DeMiner app, which is being developed by Midas Labs, is scheduled to launch in Q2 2020.

According to Midas Labs’ Jri Lee, one of HTC’s Exodus 1S smartphones should be able to mine $0.0038 of Monero a day, which doesn’t exactly turn the phone into a moneymaking machine. In fact, Decrypt ran the numbers and found that, at that rate, you’d be in line to make just over a dollar a year ($1.387). That means you’d pay off the €219 (around $237) Exodus 1S in around 170 years — excluding electricity costs, that is.

Of course, no one is going to be buying an Exodus smartphone as an investment; they’re buying it to use as a phone that can also mine a little cryptocurrency while it’s charging. What’s important from Midas Labs’ perspective is that a…