They sell it as the "mobile cryptocurrency", as if you could use your phone to mine it, make transactions, etc. But this is untrue.
That was my understanding too. They said it will be the first currency you can mine on mobile but actually it's not the first, Minergate did it first on Android. At worst it's just a fork/copy of Monero - I mean that's a good start anyway as it's a solid codebase but copying something without improving or changing it seems pointless to anyone other than the devs (who happen to stand to make a lot of money as well).
I also want to know if it's actually real mining or if it's 'simulated mining' which is even more stupid - I've heard the latter banded about a bit. The whole point of PoW is, well, proof of work. If it's simulated this is like me walking around wearing a badge saying 'I'm rich and cool' and hoping people believe it...
- on the mobile mining front they say they are first but actually Minergate was first lets you mobile mine XMR and it's near useless - I got about 14H/s on an SD810-powered smartphone, it's cool as a proof of concept but that's nothing, a low-mid range GPU (e.g. R9 270) can do 180H/s and that costs similar to the price of a similar mobile phone so who is going to waste their time and energy with that
Allow me to explain...
It's true, there has been other mobile mining apps in the past. These apps mine for real and use the processing power on your phone to do actual mining and provide actual proof of work. However, this heats up the phone and drains the battery considerably. One would be better off buying a computer for the same money and using it to mine instead.
But Electroneum is doing something new by providing a mining "experience." Phones will not perform actual mining. However, the app will continually check your phone's available CPU power, and issue you coins based on that. A faster phone will therefore have a better hash rate than a slower phone. Playing a CPU-intensive game will temporarily decrease the hash rate of your phone. So the mobile miners emits coins based on the AVAILABLE CPU capacity.
In this way, the mining is very similar to real mining, but without your phone heating up and your battery dying within 3 hours.
The "mineable" coins are split into two groups of 7 billion coins each - one group for traditional mining (computers) and one for mobile mining. The difficulty on one won't affect the other. So the fact that computer miners have increased the difficulty considerably won't influence the emission of the mobile mining pool.
Electroneum will control the emission rate via an algorithm that takes into account the current price of the coin in dollar terms, the amount of miners worldwide, and the amount of coins still available. Richard mentioned that they will adjust the algorithm to optimize growth of Electroneum over the years. For example, if a lot of coins are being mined by only a handful of miners at the start they will reduce the emission rate to save coins for users that will join later on. And if too many users sign up in the first week they will reduce the emission rate to make sure all the coins are not mined away in a few weeks.
The mobile mining experience was never meant to safeguard the blockchain. So computer miners get rewarded for actual mining (and actually safeguarding the blockchain), but mobile miners get rewarded for providing a different utility - marketing and mass adoption. Perhaps they should have chosen a different name to describe it better. But their whole idea is to EDUCATE the public about cryptocurrencies and get them to run their own computer miners, and therefore the "mobile mining experience" name was indeed a good idea.
Also their 'mobile mining' is actually a background app that doesn't use CPU power on your phone, so it's like a 'proof-of-time' system just completely not implemented. Obviously they don't understand how the proof-of-work consensus system works (it's part of network security) or they are so arrogant that they think they can bamboozle the general public into believing this - if they're just handing out coins for running some app in the background, then who is actually mining or producing these coins? If it's that trivial then where is the security? If they're going to hand out coins based on the estimated power of your phone (not the phone's CPU) then who's to stop a computer emulating hundreds of Android phones as they're not actually doing any work (if there was real computation involved you cannot fake that)?
Since the mobile mining emission algorithm is centralized with the Electroneum team, they can weed out any users who try to game the system. For starters, they can block any "phone" or "emulated phone" that has a hash rate above the typical mobile hash rates. Secondly, Richard mentioned that they will only allow 5 mobile miners per IP. Therefore someone trying to run hundreds of emulated mobile miners on one computer will be banned.
If you watch the videos of Richard explaining this stuff, you realize that they have really thought this through!
