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LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable
- pmiller2 13y agoOf course, it won't be profitable for long, now that the secret's out. :-)
- bobf 13y agoIndeed. I would estimate that at current LiteCoin values and difficulty level, mining on EC2 will stay profitable until the spot price for these instances passes $0.20-0.21. One thing that will slightly slow down the abuse of this is that by default AWS limits you to 10 spot instances per region for the g2.2xlarge type.
- bobf 13y agoI'm the author of the post. I didn't include a lot of background detail because I wanted to publish the technically interesting bits quickly. As I see it, mining LiteCoins on EC2 is currently profitable because of four main factors: 1) Bitcoin's recent dramatic increase in value. (LiteCoin's value is heavily correlated to Bitcoin's.) 2) The relatively low difficulty level for LiteCoin mining right now. 3) Spot instance pricing for the EC2 GPU (g2.2xlarge) instances. 4) LiteCoin can be mined using both GPUs and CPUs (although GPUs are dramatically better, another ~35 khashes/sec from the CPUs is still nice). Interestingly, the previous average historical spot price for these instances was ~$0.075/hour. The spot pricing has now jumped to $0.10-$0.12, depending on region. As an added bonus, you may be able to get $100 of AWS credit at http://aws.amazon.com/big-data/powerof60/ http://aws.amazon.com/big-data/powerof60/ which would give you 2-3 free days of mining.
- russell_h 13y agoCould the spot price increase also relate to "black friday" related usage?
- bobf 13y agoIt could, but we're talking about a specific GPU instance in this case. I wouldn't see an obvious correlation between Black Friday and the g2.2xlarge instance type.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- e1l1 13y agoI am seeing: Current price us-west-1a 0.101 us-west-1c 0.75
- e1l1 13y agoSo the max out of pocket is $2 an hour if I bid $0.20?
- waterlesscloud 13y agoLitecoin's value is related to Bitcoin's, but it's not a perfect correlation by any means. The market for Litecoins is even smaller than Bitcoin's, and the coins are concentrated in even fewer hands. If I were doing this, I'd sell the coins as soon as I got them. Even moreso than Bitcoin, with Litecoin the value is unstable and subject to crash at any moment.
- sciguy77 13y agoJust so everyone is aware, I filled out the form for the $100 and got the message: "Thank you. An Amazon Web Services representative will contact you." Ugh.
- Zoomla 13y agoNobody had to contact me to get a free $100 for EC2, but I used the education grant instead when I did a Coursera class (http://aws.amazon.com/grants/ http://aws.amazon.com/grants/). I have $70.99 leftover from when I got this free $100, so I will use that and try not to go too much over.
- nyc10001 13y agoI'm not seeing the g2.2xlarge instance type when I select Amazon Linux AMI 2013.09.1 - has Amazon disabled this instance type or am I missing something?
- bobf 13y agoIt isn't available in all regions. What region are you looking at?
- sdnguyen90 13y agoMake sure you are selecting the HVM AMI
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Smirnoff 13y agoOk, the plethora of bitcoin/litecoin articles on HN news are making me sick now. I feel like there are 3+ articles about it at any given time. Seriously, with all the hype, I got suckered into buying bitcoin/litecoin just to realize that I can't compete against Chinese miners. I guess I could buy coins and sit on them but there is no fun in doing so. Arbitrage is practically impossible because of the lag time to pull hard cash from the exchanges.
- fat0wl 13y agoresist, my son. i've made a pledge to myself that everytime i'm tempted to click on some BTC-related stuff i will instead study a new code library. i haven't totally wriggled free yet (obviously) but i'm close. as with all things, chasin paper is no way to live life and get-rich-quick ideas are something to discipline yourself against. in life, studying code is what has netted me the most cash that i feel proud of earning
- Smirnoff 13y agoThanks. I will instead finish my projects that I am working on :)
- ShardPhoenix 13y agoEarlier this year I decided I would buy 10 or so bitcoins if the price ever fell to $10, and so far I'm sticking to that.
- fat0wl 13y agoheh now there's a plan. even then i hope you're doin it for fun not investment. until it stabilizes its just kindof a crapshoot. i have long decided that id try it if its stable and succeeding as a currency but not as an investment since the economics are absurd. its been good for those who made a buck off it but its a game and it may have many negative implications. many have taken losses on it already during crashes (or buying mining equipment -- at least EC2 is more like renting, heh). i guess it's buyer beware but i'm not totally convinced that the entire concept doesn't amount to a scam, which is why i get a little fiesty about it. if people decide its a scheme and no one wants to buy, the only winners will be those who recognized the potential of a pump-and-dump scheme and have been cashing out bits and pieces all along
- aymeric 13y agoWhy would you publish something like this? Why not just ride on your own discovery, get as many instances as possible and get rich?
- bobf 13y agoYou're not going to get rich from this. AWS limits you to ten spot instances of this type, and profits per ten instances per day are probably going to be $20-30. I've been mining with this setup for ~4 hours and have amassed ~0.2 coins ($8!).
- aymeric 13y ago$20 per day = $600 per month Isn't it worth looking at creative ways to go around this 10 instances limit?
- yebyen 13y agoI know, I just spent $800 on mining hardware at BTC Black Friday (ButterflyLabs) just to bring my output from <$10/day to >$20/day. I think that's a better idea than buying Amazon instances at fluctuating prices, but then who knows! I also thought it was kind of fishy when BFL e-mailed me just prior to Black Friday to let me know that they were totally caught up (shipping literally months of orders worth of products in the last 24 hours?) and they had stock on the shelves, at 25% discounted prices. Fishy. After waiting 8 months for my first order to ship, yeah! But at least I'm only spending a fixed amount.
- tejasm 13y agoNaive question from a non-techie - if i were to run 10 g2.2xlarge spot instances, how much net profit per day would i make?
- fat0wl 13y agoit costs only your mind
- imahboob 13y agoSomeone should probably try this with Amazon's first year free offer.. I will probably try this out.
- carlosdp 13y agoThat's only for the Free Tier which is an m1.small or micro I believe.
- brianbreslin 13y agoI tried mining prime coin on spot micro instance (100 of them) and it was useless. Micro is too weak to mine.
- e1l1 13y agoI am trying the free tier right now. I installed https://github.com/cbuchner1/cpuminer https://github.com/cbuchner1/cpuminer. I have got it running, but I don't think its doing much of anything. Here's a tail of the log: [2013-11-29 08:15:37] Stratum detected new block [2013-11-29 08:15:37] thread 0: 83388 hashes, 0.73 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:16:32] thread 0: 44064 hashes, 0.79 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:17:55] thread 0: 47700 hashes, 0.58 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:18:14] thread 0: 34596 hashes, 1.79 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:19:38] Stratum detected new block [2013-11-29 08:19:38] thread 0: 65016 hashes, 0.78 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:20:38] Stratum detected new block [2013-11-29 08:20:38] thread 0: 26352 hashes, 0.44 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:20:50] thread 0: 26364 hashes, 2.24 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:23:40] thread 0: 134484 hashes, 0.79 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:23:51] thread 0: 47280 hashes, 4.48 khash/s
- dkasper 13y agoLooks like the spot prices have already jumped to $0.175 - $0.2 per hour
- jtms 13y agoand now up to 0.3+
- bokane 13y agoHow long did it take the pending to stop? Also, how do we SSH into the instances once pending is over? I cannot seem to find a way to launch.
- lukasm 13y agofew minutes
- jakozaur 13y agoDamn discovered this two days ago, hoped that I went under radar for a bit :-).
- tejasm 13y agohow much did you make in last two days, if i may ask?
- jakozaur 13y agoDamn discovered this two days ago, hoped that I went under radar for a bit :-).
- vigrant 13y agoI'm getting hung up when trying to install the CUDA installer. I get the error "The driver installation is unable to locate the kernel source.".
- synaesthesisx 13y agoUnfortunately due to the spike in EC2 prices this doesn't really seem much profitable anymore...but still awesome nonetheless!
- anon4 13y agoThe problem though is that while buying/selling bitcoins is just hard, exchanging litecoins is practically impossible. Currently litecoins are only used as a ponzi scheme, rather than a payment method and if anybody does what OP suggests, please be smart and cash out as fast as you can. You can cash out to bitcoins if that floats your boat, at least they are actually used for things other than being a scam.
- fragsworth 13y ago> exchanging litecoins is practically impossible > Currently litecoins are only used as a ponzi scheme What? I'm not really a fan of Litecoin but you can't just make false claims.
- glomph 13y agoJust sell them for bitcoins and then sell the bitcoins. Easy.
- lukasm 13y agoI bit skeptical of wemineltc.com (no https)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- valtron 13y agoSpot instance price is rising at about 2 cents/hour. By 11AM UTC, it'll be unprofitable.
- ishiboy 13y agoWhats the deal here? Is this still profitable? I'll pay 20 bucks to someone who can set this up for me and record it.
- iflickle 13y agoDoes any body know how to mine litecoin on amazon step by step from scratch?