Ask HN: How much BTC could AWS mine if Amazon put all resources into mining? - geetfun
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noloblo
Probably enough to do a 51% attack on the bitcoin network and convert all
bitcoins to amazon coins

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Frogolocalypse
Do you have any figures to back that up? My assumption would be that all of
amazon would be a drop in the bucket for bitcoin mining. Their hardware isn't
designed for SHA-256 hashing, so unless they had dedicated ASIC's my
assumption is that they wouldn't even be close. Be interesting to find out for
sure if someone knows though.

Just as an aside, even if you had 100% of mining you couldn't spend peoples
coins. You could stop people spending their coins, but miners can't modify
existing transactions, just not include new transactions in blocks they mine.

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geetfun
Definitely not meant to be interpreted as a practical question. Just a
theoretical "what if" kind of question.

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mammajamma
Stupid question, it would be negative ROI as electricity costs eclipse BTC
value

~~~
gus_massa
Correct answer, but bad tone. From
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> _In Comments_

> _Be civil. Don 't say things you wouldn't say in a face-to-face
> conversation. Avoid gratuitous negativity._

Somewhat related: If someone steals your Amazon credentials, he can use them
to mine bitcoins. Using the CPU to mine bitcoin is not efficient and the value
of the mined bitcoins will be much smaller that the cost of electricity and
Amazon services, but it doesn't mater because he is not paying the bill. For
example read: [http://www.securityweek.com/how-hackers-target-cloud-
service...](http://www.securityweek.com/how-hackers-target-cloud-services-
bitcoin-profit)

PS: It may be a interesting to know this as a theoretical question. But as a
practical question, the idea is not profitable at all.

