Samsung Has A Cryptocurrency Mining Rig Made Of Old Smartphones

For most people, used smartphones belong either in the trash or in the hands of carriers that accept a swap in the form of an upgrade. Samsung is now offering another alternative, which should be of interest to cryptocurrency miners. Using old models of its Galaxy smartphones, the South Korean company created a rig that can help collect digital coins.

As Futurism notes, the culture of heavy consumption among smartphone users has led to a lot of old phones getting stored away, never to be used again. This is something that Samsung’s C-Lab would like to do something about. As the company’s creative solutions resource, it’s the lab’s job to come up with things like the bitcoin mining rig that’s powered by Galaxy S5 smartphones.

This is keeping in touch with the current trends that the tech industry is seeing, particularly with regards to cryptocurrency. Both trading and mining digital coins like bitcoin have become incredibly popular, even leading to a shortage in GPUs by major sellers. The demand for more tools to mine coins is only expected to rise as well, which could make the mining rig by Samsung incredibly popular.

Just to show how gracious it is, Samsung is even promising to make the plans for the rig available to everyone for free. In an email to Motherboard, company spokesperson Robin Schultz comments on how environmentally friendly this kind of set up is.

“This innovative platform provides an environmentally responsible way for old Galaxy mobile devices to breathe new life, providing new possibilities and potential extended value for devices that might otherwise be forgotten in desk drawers or discarded,” the email reads.

This makes sense since it would be much better for the environment to reuse old devices instead of throwing them away. Instead of ending up in dump sites, old phones are used for something else.