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LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

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Re: LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

#51

Post by fragsworth »

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…

> 1) Bitcoin's recent dramatic increase in value. (LiteCoin's value is heavily correlated to Bitcoin's.)

No, actually, Litecoin's value is very different from that of Bitcoin and in the last week or two it skyrocketed from being 0.015/BTC to 0.05/BTC and back down to 0.04/BTC or so.

As a result of your post, in just 2-3 hours, the spot price on AWS went to $0.20 per instance.

An interesting economic effect of this - prior to your article, the mining profits were flowing to the miners who figured this out on AWS. After your article, the profits are now flowing to the reserved instance owners instead. Bastard.

Re: LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

#52

Post by jbkkd »

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…

Reading this: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

seems like price has increased to 0.65(?!) per hour. That doesn't sound profitable.

edit: never mind, didn't notice this was about spot instances.

Re: LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

#54

Post by Buge »

e1l1 wrote: post #46
brianbreslin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried mining prime coin on spot micro instance (100 of them) and it was useless. Micro is too weak to mine.

I am trying the free tier right now. I installed 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 [2013-11-2…

That's for litecoin and bitcoin. I would assume primecoin would be better for cpu mining because it hasn't been optimized for gpus yet.

Re: LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

#55

Post by girvo »

fat0wl wrote: post #35
ShardPhoenix wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earlier 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.

heh 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 crashe…

Your idea of investment is not the only possible definition.

Re: LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

#56

Post by bonjurkes »

qnk wrote: post #42
vigrant wrote: post #33

I'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.".

When requesting your spot instance AMI, make sure the virtualization type is "hvm" instead of "paravirtual".

It's already hvm. Amazon says Kernel ID : - . Can it be the reason? Should we choose kernel manually?

Re: LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

#57

Post by glomph »

anon4 wrote: post #43

The 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.

Just sell them for bitcoins and then sell the bitcoins. Easy.

Re: LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

#58

Post by sentenza »

knowitall wrote: post #48
Smirnoff wrote: post #11

Ok, 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…

What are you even talking about? Buying bitcoins and mining are not the same thing. Just keep the bitcoins you bought and thank HN in 10 years for making you rich. Btw Bitcoin is also very interesting from a technical point of view.

But infuriatingly, the NSA scandal is causing technical trouble with my (our?) actual primary source of income, but is practically banned from HN.

If the NSA is "too political" for HN, then Bitcoin is "too get rich quick without working" for HN.

Re: LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

#59

Post by astrodust »

knowitall wrote: post #48
Smirnoff wrote: post #11

Ok, 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…

What are you even talking about? Buying bitcoins and mining are not the same thing. Just keep the bitcoins you bought and thank HN in 10 years for making you rich. Btw Bitcoin is also very interesting from a technical point of view.

How are those shares from all those companies in the Y2K bubble working out for you?

Re: LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

#60

Post by yebyen »

aymeric wrote: post #50
bobf wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'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!).

$20 per day = $600 per month Isn't it worth looking at creative ways to go around this 10 instances limit?

I know, I just spent $800 on mining hardware at BTC Black Friday (ButterflyLabs) just to bring my output from $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.

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