Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

completefusion.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 70 posts

Re: LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

#3

Post by bobf »

I'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/ which would give you 2-3 free days of mining.

Re: LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

#4

Post by bobf »

pmiller2 wrote: post #2

Of course, it won't be profitable for long, now that the secret's out. :-)

Indeed. 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.

Re: LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

#5

Post by laurencei »

bobf wrote: post #4
pmiller2 wrote: post #2

Of course, it won't be profitable for long, now that the secret's out. :-)

Indeed. 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.

couldnt you just register multiple users - and thus by-pass this limit of 10?

Re: LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

#6

Post by russell_h »

bobf wrote: post #3

I'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 instan…

Could the spot price increase also relate to "black friday" related usage?

Re: LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

#7

Post by tejasm »

laurencei wrote: post #5
bobf wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. 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.

couldnt you just register multiple users - and thus by-pass this limit of 10?

You could, if you had multiple credit cards I guess.

Re: LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

#8

Post by bobf »

russell_h wrote: post #6
bobf wrote: post #3

I'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 instan…

Could the spot price increase also relate to "black friday" related usage?

It 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.
Post reply on HN