LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

[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/ which would give you 2-3 free days of mining.

[fragsworth]

> 1) Bitcoin's recent dramatic increase in value. (LiteCoin's value is heavily correlated to Bitcoin's.)

No, actually, Litecoin's value is very different from that of Bitcoin and in the last week or two it skyrocketed from being 0.015/BTC to 0.05/BTC and back down to 0.04/BTC or so.

As a result of your post, in just 2-3 hours, the spot price on AWS went to $0.20 per instance.

An interesting economic effect of this - prior to your article, the mining profits were flowing to the miners who figured this out on AWS. After your article, the profits are now flowing to the reserved instance owners instead. Bastard.

[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.

[waterlesscloud]

Litecoin's value is related to Bitcoin's, but it's not a perfect correlation by any means. The market for Litecoins is even smaller than Bitcoin's, and the coins are concentrated in even fewer hands.

If I were doing this, I'd sell the coins as soon as I got them. Even moreso than Bitcoin, with Litecoin the value is unstable and subject to crash at any moment.

[jbkkd]

Reading this: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

seems like price has increased to 0.65(?!) per hour. That doesn't sound profitable.

edit: never mind, didn't notice this was about spot instances.

[russell_h]

Could the spot price increase also relate to "black friday" related usage?

[blackgloves]

Do you have the step by step instructions on how to do this?

[e1l1]

So the max out of pocket is $2 an hour if I bid $0.20?

[e1l1]

I am seeing:

Current price us-west-1a 0.101 us-west-1c 0.75

[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

[knowitall]

What are you even talking about? Buying bitcoins and mining are not the same thing.

Just keep the bitcoins you bought and thank HN in 10 years for making you rich.

Btw Bitcoin is also very interesting from a technical point of view.

[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.

[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!).

[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?

[sdnguyen90]

Make sure you are selecting the HVM AMI

[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".

[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]

it's still under the 0.20-0.21 benchmark... so profitable i guess.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[glomph]

Just sell them for bitcoins and then sell the bitcoins. Easy.