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Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code

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Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code

#11

Post by qq66 »

throwaway0094 wrote: post #4

So: 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…

You also don't need to sing in the shower. You can leave the shower earlier, hire a TaskRabbit to sing for you instead, and if you value your time correctly you should come out ahead.

Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code

#12

Post by paulhodge »

edgesrazor wrote: post #10

I'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.

One guess, maybe the spot price is controlled by some sort of predictive algorithm, and the algorithm got totally confused by the recent load? It might not be the case that people are actually paying that price.

Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code

#13

Post by AdamMeghji »

I also used this brief window of opportunity as a fun experiment in learning Ansible. As a result, I've published a repo which automates setting up LTC mining on g2.2xlarge instances.

http://github.com/adammeghji/ansible-ltc-mining-on-ec2

If anybody's curious to spin up a GPU instance and dabble with this, this greatly facilitates downloading, compiling, and installing the CUDA drivers, and setting up the LTC miners. Amazon has a $100 credit available too, if the current spot instance prices are prohibitive.

Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code

#15

Post by michaelt »

edgesrazor wrote: post #10

I'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.

One pricing strategy I've heard of goes like so:

No rational person would bid above the on demand price, so the spot price will never rise above the on demand price. Therefore if I bid just above the on demand price I'll never be outbid, and I won't have to deal with automating the switch from spot to on demand instances.

Needless to say, this logic is wrong.

Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code

#19

Post by topynate »

edgesrazor wrote: post #10

I'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.

I don't know, but I can speculate with the best of them: Someone posted on a bitcoin forum that they were doing this, showing how they were bidding on spot prices etc. A bunch of people raced to get in on some free money ASAP, of whom a significant proportion neither did the expected value calculation nor realised that it was possible to rent at a flat rate! Crowd mentality, in other words.

Re: Briefly profitable alt-coin mining on Amazon through better code

#20

Post by edgesrazor »

michaelt wrote: post #15
edgesrazor wrote: post #10

I'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.

One pricing strategy I've heard of goes like so: No rational person would bid above the on demand price, so the spot price will never rise above the on demand price. Therefore if I bid just above the on demand price I'll never be outbid, and I won't have to deal with automating the switch from spot to on demand instances. Needless to say, this logic is wrong.

Funny you should mention that. There was a blog post I had read where they were discussing an unfortunate AWS customer who bid $999.00/hour for Spot instances thinking it would protect their running servers from shutting down. Little did this person realize, Amazon - unlike eBay - doesn't just accept the next highest bid, they accept THE highest bid. They were running a Spot instance for an entire month at $999/hour. Ouch.
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