The article talks about energy efficiency but it says nothing about the effectiveness of the production of coins. If Samsung will earn 1 Satoshi per hour and thus do not consume energy, it will be a useless toy. I think it's just the concept of Samsung which would have continue. I understand that there is no one prototype in order to be able to talk about it. With regard to the protection I saw an alarm that uses a Siemens 35. He's not even a smartphone. What to do 5s?
I highly doubt this setup would be energy efficient to do anything else other than be a mobile phone. Because if they could be "upcycled" to perform better than their original purpose, then they're either guilty of not building energy-efficient phones in the first place, or have seriously underestimated the hashing power required to have any significant returns on Bitcoin mining. They probably are better off going for something like... Bitcoin Gold
Just because 8 phones are better at mining Bitcoin than a desktop computer doesn't make it a great achievement.
Nice try Samsung, kudos all the same to your engineers for a bit of creativity but you've got to see the funny side of this.
But if I think again, it's not even that stupid. Those smartphones are kind of outdated, they wouldn't be able to sell them to customers so at least they found a use for them. I have doubts about their energy efficiency claims but I guess they're not lying. I am not sure about profitability but I see this potential in this project from environmental perspective because they re-used (recycled) old devices.