
LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable - bobf
http://www.completefusion.com/profitable-litecoin-mining-on-ec2/
======
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/](http://aws.amazon.com/big-
data/powerof60/) which would give you 2-3 free days of mining.

~~~
sciguy77
Just so everyone is aware, I filled out the form for the $100 and got the
message: "Thank you. An Amazon Web Services representative will contact you."
Ugh.

~~~
Zoomla
Nobody had to contact me to get a free $100 for EC2, but I used the education
grant instead when I did a Coursera class
([http://aws.amazon.com/grants/](http://aws.amazon.com/grants/)). I have
$70.99 leftover from when I got this free $100, so I will use that and try not
to go too much over.

------
Smirnoff
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 hard cash
from the exchanges.

~~~
fat0wl
resist, my son. i've made a pledge to myself that everytime i'm tempted to
click on some BTC-related stuff i will instead study a new code library. i
haven't totally wriggled free yet (obviously) but i'm close. as with all
things, chasin paper is no way to live life and get-rich-quick ideas are
something to discipline yourself against.

in life, studying code is what has netted me the most cash that i feel proud
of earning

~~~
ShardPhoenix
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.

~~~
fat0wl
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 crashes (or buying mining equipment -- at least EC2 is more like
renting, heh). i guess it's buyer beware but i'm not totally convinced that
the entire concept doesn't amount to a scam, which is why i get a little
fiesty about it.

if people decide its a scheme and no one wants to buy, the only winners will
be those who recognized the potential of a pump-and-dump scheme and have been
cashing out bits and pieces all along

~~~
girvo
Your idea of investment is not the only possible definition.

------
pmiller2
Of course, it won't be profitable for long, now that the secret's out. :-)

~~~
bobf
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.

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

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

------
aymeric
Why would you publish something like this? Why not just ride on your own
discovery, get as many instances as possible and get rich?

~~~
bobf
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!).

~~~
aymeric
$20 per day = $600 per month

Isn't it worth looking at creative ways to go around this 10 instances limit?

~~~
yebyen
I know, I just spent $800 on mining hardware at BTC Black Friday
(ButterflyLabs) just to bring my output from <$10/day to >$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.

------
nyc10001
I'm not seeing the g2.2xlarge instance type when I select Amazon Linux AMI
2013.09.1 - has Amazon disabled this instance type or am I missing something?

~~~
bobf
It isn't available in all regions. What region are you looking at?

~~~
nyc10001
Hmm, I just checked in US West, East, Ireland, and Singapore. Still not seeing
it..

~~~
jtms
same... not seeing the GPU ones

------
jakozaur
Damn discovered this two days ago, hoped that I went under radar for a bit
:-).

~~~
tejasm
how much did you make in last two days, if i may ask?

------
vigrant
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.".

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

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

------
bokane
How long did it take the pending to stop? Also, how do we SSH into the
instances once pending is over? I cannot seem to find a way to launch.

~~~
lukasm
few minutes

------
synaesthesisx
Unfortunately due to the spike in EC2 prices this doesn't really seem much
profitable anymore...but still awesome nonetheless!

~~~
atburrow
I'm looking at the spot instance price and it's hovering around ~$0.10. It's
still profitable.

------
tejasm
Naive question from a non-techie - if i were to run 10 g2.2xlarge spot
instances, how much net profit per day would i make?

~~~
fsckin
Back of napkin math: spend $29 to mine $50 worth of LTC.

~~~
tejasm
Thanks... so not that bad considering it wouldn't require any continuous
efforts.

------
lukasm
I bit skeptical of wemineltc.com (no https)

------
imahboob
Someone should probably try this with Amazon's first year free offer.. I will
probably try this out.

~~~
carlosdp
That's only for the Free Tier which is an m1.small or micro I believe.

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

~~~
e1l1
I am trying the free tier right now. I installed
[https://github.com/cbuchner1/cpuminer](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
[2013-11-29 08:18:14] thread 0: 34596 hashes, 1.79 khash/s [2013-11-29
08:19:38] Stratum detected new block [2013-11-29 08:19:38] thread 0: 65016
hashes, 0.78 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:20:38] Stratum detected new block
[2013-11-29 08:20:38] thread 0: 26352 hashes, 0.44 khash/s [2013-11-29
08:20:50] thread 0: 26364 hashes, 2.24 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:23:40] thread 0:
134484 hashes, 0.79 khash/s [2013-11-29 08:23:51] thread 0: 47280 hashes, 4.48
khash/s

~~~
Buge
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.

~~~
e1l1
May be so. I have very little understanding of any of this. What I am doing
right now certainly isn't worth even this tiny bit of effort that I have put
into so far. My Account Balance is 0.00016236 LTC after 9 hours.

------
ishiboy
Whats the deal here?

Is this still profitable? I'll pay 20 bucks to someone who can set this up for
me and record it.

------
valtron
Spot instance price is rising at about 2 cents/hour. By 11AM UTC, it'll be
unprofitable.

------
iflickle
Does any body know how to mine litecoin on amazon step by step from scratch?

------
dkasper
Looks like the spot prices have already jumped to $0.175 - $0.2 per hour

~~~
jtms
and now up to 0.3+

------
fat0wl
it costs only your _mind_

------
anon4
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.

~~~
fragsworth
> exchanging litecoins is practically impossible

> Currently litecoins are only used as a ponzi scheme

What? I'm not really a fan of Litecoin but you can't just make false claims.

