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It's not quite that simple, because you can't just exchange X bitcoins for Y watts. Let's say you want 1000 BTC. You could get this by investing several thousa
by weavejester 16y ago
It's not quite that simple, because you can't just exchange X bitcoins for Y watts.
Let's say you want 1000 BTC. You could get this by investing several thousand dollars in a mining rig, and then waiting a year. In that time, you'll likely succeed in generating your 1000 BTC.
Alternatively, you could buy bitcoins from an exchange for $3000. The current price of bitcoins is several times higher than the cost of the electricity used to generate them, because there's a significant initial cost to mining, in both capital and time.
- stcredzero 16y agoIt's not quite that simple, because you can't just exchange X bitcoins for Y watts. Well, you can, if you're also willing to pony up some cash to Amazon for some EC2 time. It's more like you can just exchange X bitcoins for Y BogoMIPS, but this also varies over time.
- weavejester 16y agoEC2 instances don't have high-end graphics cards, and the payout from CPU-mining is not usually cost effective. It would be far cheaper to buy bitcoins over an exchange than spend money mining them on a EC2 instance. There's also a limit to how many coins you can generate per day. Even if your grid of EC2 instances accounted for say, a quarter of all Bitcoin processing power, you'd still only make 15 coins an hour.
- wmf 16y agoEC2 does have GPUs: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/11/15/announcing-cluster-gpu-instances-for-amazon-ec2/ http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2010/11/15/announc... People have calculated that you still can't make money mining Bitcoins on EC2, though.
- stcredzero 15y agoMy point was that you can do this, not that it would be profitable.