3 ms·
Ask HN: Whats the math around Bitcoin on EC2
I get that Bitcoin mining is no profitable on EC2 (at least I assume it isn't). However, I have no numbers to back it up. Can someone please walk through the numbers so when someone asks me, I can tell them why it isn't profitable on EC2, even with today's high BTC prices.
- byoung2 13y agoHere is a discussion from 2011, when bitcoin was much easier to mine, but worth a lot less: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=8405.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=8405.0 Back then, when bitcoin was about $5, one guy was able to mine 0.38BTC (~$2) in 9 hours for $20 of EC2 time. Now that bitcoin is over $1000, you might think it is profitable, but mining has become more difficult than in 2011. Bitcoin mining is designed to get more difficult over time...like listing the prime numbers, where the 1 and 2 digit ones come easy, the 3 digit ones get tougher, and so on. Intuitively, I would say that if you could put $100 into some new mining technology and get $150 out, then everyone would do it, and the low-hanging fruit would quickly dry up, and soon you'd be putting $150 in to get $100 out.
- wmf 13y agoThere's a bit of a catch here; because EC2 mining is so obviously unprofitable there aren't any calculators that support it. NVIDIA Tesla M2050 mines almost 100 MH/s; a cg1.4xlarge has two M2050s for ~$1,500/month and it generates about $5/month: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/0803c4e57d http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/0803c4e57d There was an article about Litecoin being profitable the other day, though. (I regard Litecoin as being even more of a bubble than Bitcoin, but you could hedge by periodically selling your LTC for BTC.)
- ilovecookies 13y agohere are some charts for profitability http://minercharts.com/ http://minercharts.com/