Phoneum Turns Crypto Into Serious Mobile Payments Proposition

There was once a Dilbert strip where Dilbert and Topper—a man known for one-upsmanship at the office—compared phones. Topper revealed a phone larger than his own head, and noted that it paid off his mortgage by mining bitcoin. The idea that a phone could do that today is preposterous, but mobile mining may not be out of line thanks to a new report sent our way from Phoneum.

Dubbed “the world’s first truly mobile-only mining solution,” Phoneum is out to get the better than 2.1 billion smart devices mining cryptocurrency. Specifically, its own cryptocurrency, the eponymous Phoneum. Essentially, the coin is simple enough to mine that it can be done from a smartphone interface, and that’s a development that should open up mining opportunities to end users worldwide.

Phoneum boasts its own customized blockchain, and a complete mobile-only network of peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions. It comes with a quick response (QR) scanner built in, making it effective at transferring Phoneum from one user to another. The app to mine Phoneum is free to download, and includes its own crypto wallet.

Mining is poised to have a lower cost of entry than buying the currency outright, and there will not only be free P2P transactions, but also fractional merchant fees to get some actual stores interested in accepting Phoneum. Phoneum won’t be rare; it’s launching as an ERC20 token with a maximum supply of 20 billion coins. Of those, 2.4624 billion will be made available as a presale starting on June 21.

It’s a novel enough proposition, to offer up a coin that not only can be mined with a smartphone’s processors, but can be directly used as a mobile payments tool as well. The immediacy of a QR code will likely be useful, but this coin is going to seriously suffer from an overall lack of mainstreaming. There’s not much word on what merchants will actually accept Phoneum for goods and / or services, and that limited scope—if there are even any who will take it—will make Phoneum a limited prospect out the door.

Still, it’s an exciting idea. It’d be more exciting if it had more immediate usefulness, but Phoneum still has to get some credit for novelty. Sadly, it looks like all it will ever be is just a novelty.