Nope. I have made profitability assessments on several different cloud GPU solutions having different hardware.

As a general rule, for every 100 USD you'd only mine about ~50 USD's worth of crypto-currencies.

Which is not surprising since on these products you get a fancy motherboard + high-end Intel CPUs + boatloads of RAM.

These are of little to no use when mining, and account for about half of the cost of this hardware. Also, the local cost of electricity is not the lowest price in the world (China having one of the lowest)

While the price of hardware is fixed, crypto-currencies possess a difficulty adjustment mechanism. This makes the whole system have an upper bound on mining profitability, and this bound converges on the profitability of the best-yield-hardware's. Which would be something to the tune of this [1]. Note that while having 6 GPUs, this system has 8 GB of RAM and an Intel Celeron.

[1] https://blockoperations.com/6-gpu-mining-rig-amd-rx580-intel...

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EDIT: We're talking about IO-bandwidth-bound crypto-currencies here, like all the ones based on EThash[2][3], Ethereum being one of them. Bitcoin's upper bound on profitability is set by the best ASICs for SHA256 processing.

[2] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethash

[3] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethash-Design-Rational...

You probably didn't evaluate Spot prices. I wrote a tool once to evaluate current AWS spot prices against the Ethereum price and sometimes it was a low as losing 2 cents per hour and G2 instance.

AWS is by far the most profitable business unit at Amazon, with margins consistently in the 25% range.

https://www.recode.net/2017/4/27/15451726/amazon-q1-2017-ear...

if this is true:

> it was a low as losing 2 cents per hour

then it seems someone should be able to negotiate with you (even if not Amazon), especially if you're willing to use 1,000 or 10,000 instances - and don't need memory, etc.

it seems 2¢ should be within what you might be able to shave off of somewhere...

maybe not, though.

Funny side note: when I prepared for getting into all this mining and increasing G2 quota in N Virginia from 2 to 20 or so, customer support first needed to check "if this won't disrupt overall region stability". Don't know if this was bs or if scalability in Aws might be worse than we think.

Used to get told the same thing for GP2 EBS and R3.8xlarge limits in us-west-2 all the time. On a couple occasions was told no, that increasing the limit wasn't possible due to existing commitments in the region, so I'm not entirely sure if it's a canned response or actually a legit concern of theirs.

We frequently request account limit increases to 1000-2000 instance limits and get the same canned response. Though I bet in the earlier days capacity allowances for GPUs was probably more sensitive.

I have some free AWS credits and would like to use them to mine some cryptocurrencies. Anyone here able to help me out as I'm quite a noob in this field..? I thought if I can launch loads of instances at the same time to mine the same currency, I would burn all my credits in no time but have higher rewards, or am I wrong?

Love to hear your thoughts on this!

hey I could help, please email me at [email protected]

It's not profitable to mine using your own money. But i am pretty sure those instances will be abused by carders. Like you invest 100$ in carded money and get 50$ back in cryptocurrency.

No. Nowadays the big players in mining cryptocurrency have datacenters full of ASIC's. The currencies that are resistant to ASIC mining (due to eg using memory-bound hashing functions), like Monero, are probably just as resistant to GPU mining as they are to ASIC mining, although if you were to investigate it, I'd look at one of those and not bitcoin.

No. Making a GPU resistant algorithm is hard. Ethereum is ASIC but not GPU resistant.

Why is that? I understand that GPU's have a ton more memory than an ASIC, but couldn't you attach a huge amount of RAM or something to your ASIC (kinda like how GPU's work)?

Those ASICs will cost as much as GPUs or more for the same amount of performance.

Thanks!

Although, since an ASIC is application specific, couldn't you pack more cores (since you can ignore the circuitry that you don't need) or otherwise optimise for the application? If you can do more work, or do the same amount of work with less energy, then it could still be worth it.

I am obviously ignoring a rather important factor: its unlikely a "small" player could make a more performant ASIC than a "big" player like the GPU vendors, who have invested billions into building high performance hardware in a cost effective way. I'm not really asking "why don't people do this", but rather asking if its possible at all given a big enough budget.

This does not apply to Equihash (ZCash) or DaggerHashimoto. NiceHash consistently mines those on my 2 rigs (3x 1070 GTX rigs.)

gaming GPU prices and availability would like to talk with you. where i live, 1070 price has gone up 50% in 6 months - if you manage to get one. it's crazy and was attributed to ethereum/zcash mining.

A similar thing happened when bitcoin GPU mining became big. I was watching an interview recently with one of the large mining operations where they basically bought all of a suppliers GPU stock (of whatever type of card was popular for mining at the time) and couldn't find any other suppliers who weren't out of stock.

Of course not. Then everyone would use it for that purpose alone.

No

well in 2011 i was using a Desktop PC + 3 GPUs to mine bitcoins which was barely profitable at a Bitcoin price of around $20 USD. Would i have kept them though and not sold at that price.... FML

I could reward if someone can help me out burning my AWS credits to mine lots of cryptocurrencies! ;)