

Ask HN: Whats the math around Bitcoin on EC2 - jmartens

I get that Bitcoin mining is no profitable on EC2 (at least I assume it isn&#x27;t). However, I have no numbers to back it up. Can someone please walk through the numbers so when someone asks me, I can tell them why it isn&#x27;t profitable on EC2, even with today&#x27;s high BTC prices.
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wmf
There's a bit of a catch here; because EC2 mining is so obviously unprofitable
there aren't any calculators that support it. NVIDIA Tesla M2050 mines almost
100 MH/s; a cg1.4xlarge has two M2050s for ~$1,500/month and it generates
about $5/month:
[http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/0803c4e57d](http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/0803c4e57d)

There was an article about Litecoin being profitable the other day, though. (I
regard Litecoin as being even more of a bubble than Bitcoin, but you could
hedge by periodically selling your LTC for BTC.)

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byoung2
Here is a discussion from 2011, when bitcoin was much easier to mine, but
worth a lot less:

[https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=8405.0](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=8405.0)

Back then, when bitcoin was about $5, one guy was able to mine 0.38BTC (~$2)
in 9 hours for $20 of EC2 time. Now that bitcoin is over $1000, you might
think it is profitable, but mining has become more difficult than in 2011.

Bitcoin mining is designed to get more difficult over time...like listing the
prime numbers, where the 1 and 2 digit ones come easy, the 3 digit ones get
tougher, and so on. Intuitively, I would say that if you could put $100 into
some new mining technology and get $150 out, then everyone would do it, and
the low-hanging fruit would quickly dry up, and soon you'd be putting $150 in
to get $100 out.

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ilovecookies
here are some charts for profitability
[http://minercharts.com/](http://minercharts.com/)

