Okay, so I decided to fart around with this Bitcoin and Litecoin mining stuff since I had a $100 VISA gift card. Let me stop you right now – no, I’m not one of those speculators that hope to become a billionaire by jumping on the this fad bandwagon. However, I do find the tech interesting for the “stick it to the man” value and MAYBE, just maybe there will be value in the future. As we all know, Bitcoin has bubble written all over it but hey, hind site is always 20/20 so for now, I’d like to just play with the tech.

I setup a GPU instance in Amazon EC2 after following some how-to guides on the Internet but the results have been spotty. Basically, I have the two Tesla M2050 GPUs mining Bitcoins and the 16 CPU cores mining Litecoins. Since I’m using spot Instances, I’m getting a much better rate than the standard $2.10 an hour rate but I will need to crunch the numbers later on to figure out if this is worth the time. Many of the articles that I referenced were from last year so obviously, the payout vs Amazon EC2 at that time was really shitty. However, since Bitcoin has skyrocketed in the past month, we MIGHT have a nice balance for the hobbyist.

For the Bitcoin GPU mining, I have gotten a peak of about 130 MH/s but it varies. For Litecoin, I’m getting around 50 KH/s using the same EC2 AMI. Once I figure out what I’m doing, I’ll try to post a tutorial. Here are some preliminary numbers:

US East (Northern Virginia) Region

Spot Instances:
Cluster GPU Four Extra Large (cg1.4xlarge) Linux/UNIX Spot Instance-hour in US East (Virginia) in Zone #1, 2 Hrs = $0.69
Cluster GPU Four Extra Large (cg1.4xlarge) Linux/UNIX Spot Instance-hour in US East (Virginia) in Zone #7 , 23 Hrs = $7.96
Cluster GPU Four Extra Large (cg1.4xlarge) Windows Spot Instance-hour in US East (Virginia) in Zone #1, 1 Hr = $0.21
Amazon EC2 EBS:
$0.10 per 1 million I/O requests 590, 429 IOs = $0.06
$0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage 0.592 GB-Mo = $0.06

Total = $8.98

I used the mining pools Deepbit.net for Bitcoins and LiteBonk.com for Litecoins and here is what I was able to mine:

0.00132712 BTC

0.02605779 LTC

The exchange rate today for Bitcoins was around $122 so as you can see, this is not profitably by any means (duh!) but it is kind of fun. I’ll slap together a guide and try to make some tweaks in future posts!

This entry was posted in Cloud and tagged amazon ec2, bitcoin, litecoin, mining.

Source: www.virtualjj.com