Re:Ask HN: does bitcoin mining pay off?
by chanced on Monday February 04, 2013 @03:18PM
(#5166803)
I honestly don't know. My guess would be no, for two reasons.
GPU vs. CPU; GPUs are much better at the number crunching needed in producing the hashes ("mining"). I doubt very seriously that you can get the kind horsepower out of a vm. I could be wrong; they may have machines dedicated to scientific numeric calcs but then you would likely need to produce a driver for harnessing it, if it even exists.
Computational pricing would likely dwarf any kind of return. Electricity costs alone can be enough to offset profits. I can only imagine what adding AWS fees on top of it would do too.
GPU vs. CPU; GPUs are much better at the number crunching needed in producing the hashes ("mining"). I doubt very seriously that you can get the kind horsepower out of a vm. I could be wrong; they may have machines dedicated to scientific numeric calcs but then you would likely need to produce a driver for harnessing it, if it even exists.
Computational pricing would likely dwarf any kind of return. Electricity costs alone can be enough to offset profits. I can only imagine what adding AWS fees on top of it would do too.