Geomining

This Blog Post was originally published on the platform "writelier" (formerly "co-writers" and "200wordsaday"). Sadly the blogging platform was discontinued. I downloaded all my blog posts and prepared them to be republish them here.

I think I wrote about Cryptocurrencies in the past. In recent days I have seen strange advertising coming up on Facebook and Instagram.

It advertises an app where you can earn money for "walking". I was ignoring the advertising as it sounded a bit scammy. A coworker told me today that they were also doing television advertising which made me think about it again.

If you have the money to pay for tv advertising, it can't be a complete scam.

I didn't completely read through the whole website, but it seems they want to build something called "bound witness".

For what I understand, you basically verify your location information, which means they get GPS info from me. Many people claim that apps are collecting location history to sell them off.

This app seems to be rewarding the "data producer" for the data. But there are several points I found out today.

Not only do you have to install the app, but you also have to run it constantly to collect rewards. They also offer a Bluetooth token device ("SentinelX") which 12x your rewards, probably because those tokens can be cross-verified from other phones.

Also, when you move and have the app open, you earn more. So it hurts the phone battery and lifetime in general.

I had the app on my phone now for about 10 hours, until I understood that the app needs to be active (maybe 10 minutes ago), I had it closed and wasn't collecting anything.

You get 100 COIN as starting balance and since the morning I have collected 377.12. A relatively small amount if you ask me.

Luckily I have a spare android phone lying around. I will install the app and keep the phone active, it will be interesting to see how much it can make from staying at home.

I also ordered this SentinelX device as you only have to pay for shipping currently.

In terms of exchange the earned coins to other cryptocurrencies or money, the app offers a few different methods. One Ether (from the Ethereum Blockchain) is currently rated at 469300 coins.

One ETH is currently about 193.80€. If I take "today's" earnings, divide them by hours I come to an hourly rate of 37.712 coins. Diving the price of one ETH means 12444 hours (rounded down), which are 518.5 days or 1.42 years.

Keeping your phone running for that long will definitely break it.

As soon as I've got more accurate values I'll post an update. If you want to check it out yourself, you could use my referral link. Or you can click here, without my referral.

IMPORTANT: If you do sign up and buy this Sentinel device, be sure to cancel the subscription that they sell you with it because it isn't needed for the functioning of the app. They have a little bit of A*Hole design there.