Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code
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Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code
1–10 of 57 posts
Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code
#2I wonder how many people have custom improved mining software and using it as a competitive advantage.
Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code
#3I wonder how many people have custom improved mining software and using it as a competitive advantage.
It's a good question. In the case of these nvidia cards, it doesn't seem worthwhile: If you're seriously mining for money and buying hardware, you're still better off buying the AMD GPUs. I don't know if there's similar room for improvement on the OpenCL mining code, but it seems like it gets more attention.
Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code
#4So: 1.5 weeks of work. $50-$75/mo/instance. x20-60 instances. Worked for 3-4 weeks.
If we assume the most optimistic parameters: $75 * 1mo * 60 instances = $4500 in profit for 1.5 weeks of work, or a rate of ~$156k/yr.
Edit: It looks like I misread his revenue numbers for profit. Oops! Even lower margins:
"My gross revenue was about $1000, and I paid Amazon $500 of that."
$500 for 1.5 weeks' work is only $17k/yr rate. Maybe flipping burgers pays better.
Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code
#5So: 1.5 weeks of work. $50-$75/mo/instance. x20-60 instances. Worked for 3-4 weeks. If we assume the most optimistic parameters: $75 * 1mo * 60 instances = $4500 in profit for 1.5 weeks of work, or a rate of ~$156k/yr. Edit: It looks like I misread his revenue numbers for profit. Oops! Even lower margins: "My gross revenue was about $1000, and I paid Amazon $500 of that." $500 for 1.5 weeks' work is only $17k/yr rate…
Well, if he just leaves this running, assuming the same level of profitability it is 17k a year of passive income...definitely worth keeping up if possible. as the exchange rate goes up it should become even more profitable.
Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code
#6I wonder how many people have custom improved mining software and using it as a competitive advantage.
It's a good question. In the case of these nvidia cards, it doesn't seem worthwhile: If you're seriously mining for money and buying hardware, you're still better off buying the AMD GPUs. I don't know if there's similar room for improvement on the OpenCL mining code, but it seems like it gets more attention.
Maybe it's not worthwhile for Bitcoins or Litecoins, but how about the smaller altcoins for which a competitive advantage early on can have a big impact?
Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code
#7I'm currently doing this right now with 30 instances. I'm currently operating at about 7 MH/s. At current rates, it's not exactly "profitable", but I'm using up some AWS credit that I have. I don't intend to sell the LTC until it hits about 40 or maybe 50, but in any case, it's still all profit for me, other than the fact that I lose out on the AWS credit for other uses.
Edit: I'm also not paying $6/hr... That would be absurd. I'm not unprofitable by much.
Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code
#8So: 1.5 weeks of work. $50-$75/mo/instance. x20-60 instances. Worked for 3-4 weeks. If we assume the most optimistic parameters: $75 * 1mo * 60 instances = $4500 in profit for 1.5 weeks of work, or a rate of ~$156k/yr. Edit: It looks like I misread his revenue numbers for profit. Oops! Even lower margins: "My gross revenue was about $1000, and I paid Amazon $500 of that." $500 for 1.5 weeks' work is only $17k/yr rate…
Well, if he just leaves this running, assuming the same level of profitability it is 17k a year of passive income...definitely worth keeping up if possible. as the exchange rate goes up it should become even more profitable.
The spot market prices have been going up non-stop. I finally pulled the plug today when my expected daily revenue was down to about $5. (There's some risk inherent in doing this, because a market crash could leave you saddled with a day of Amazon bills with nothing to show for it. So it becomes less attractive at low margins.)
I was only able to run 60 nodes for the first two days. After that, spot market prices in CA and Oregon went too high for profitability.
At this point, the spot market has gone insane. Mining with my code isn't profitable over about $0.130/hour with the current exchange rates, and the market is at, um, $6/hour in some places. I hypothesize that people are typo'ing in their EC2 spot bids and typing $6 when they mean $0.6, because otherwise it's completely irrational: You can get a normal instance for $0.65/hour. Not that people are rational, but...
It also requires some care and feeding. The $17k isn't really free passive income. The pools go awry, the exchanges go awry, ... At larger scale, you could amortize all of that management time and automate the majority of it, but at a few bucks here and there it's simply not worth it.
Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code
#9"With the increase in scrypt coin prices, the load on the mining pools increased, and most began experiencing frequent outages."
He should have used p2pool.
Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code
#10I'd been doing my own research on viability of mining on Amazon, and I posed a question on the AWS forums asking how it's possible the spot prices could be going so high. There's instances going anywhere from 5-20 times their On-Demand prices. At this time, no one's answered it, so if anyone here knows, I'd love to hear why someone would pay $10.00 per hour for an instance they can get On-Demand for $2.40.