In comparison, Amazon EC2 offers GPU clusters for $2.10000/hr [1]. Each cluster contains 2x M2050 Fermi cores [2] which each put out ~80MHash/sec [3]. To get t

In comparison, Amazon EC2 offers GPU clusters for $2.10000/hr [1]. Each cluster contains 2x M2050 Fermi cores [2] which each put out ~80MHash/sec [3]. To get the requisite 64686 GHash/sec, you'd need to spin up 404287 of these things, which costs you $849000/hr. This is of course assuming Amazon has 400000 instances of the GPU compute clusters. The cheaper alternative is to utilise spot GPU instances, costing only $0.346/hr [4]. At that price, i's $139900/hr or so. I am willing to bet that they do not just have 400000 spare GPU instances laying around unused, however. All this was purely academic, but it kind of amuses me that for a theoretical $140000/hr, you could hyjack bitcoin as it is currently. [1] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/ [2] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/ [3] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison [4] http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/#spot http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/#spot