Mining Verium with AWS Spot Instances
I have experimented with GPU based mining on AWS, but haven’t found any methods where I can get the hashrate at anywhere near a decent speed (even with using the custom GPU type EC2 instances).
So I am now looking at using an AWS EC2 instance to mine a cryptographic currency on a CPU basis. Initially I will test using an on-demand EC2 instance, but would like to switch to using a spot instance (probably several spot instances), to reduce my costs.
Last night, I experimented with mining Verium.
These are the Megahash rates that I was getting (all on Windows 64 bit):
Work laptop (using 3 logical processors of 4):
- 308.59
- 423.28
- 347.86
AWS Micro (using 1 vCPU of 1):
- 296.118
- 201.718
- 423.28
- 12.0623
- 22.957
Note: I think the last 2 figures are low because I was only using 1 vCPU (of 1) and I could see an AntiMalware process running, with high CPU utilisation.
AWS c5.4xlarge (using 15 vCPU’s of 16):
- 1626.95
- 3890.1
- 3837.7
I then used https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1b02BuES4AwZW9kpqzmyrPlEfO55TWdU_mFhgnVaakQ4/edit#gid=366374027 to forecast profit/loss.
Even if I used AWS Linux spot instances, I would make a loss of about $600 per year.
There are some variables, such as I don’t know how many hours per month I would be able to have a spot mining instance at the price I wanted it, the difficulty of mining will increase at some point, the value of Verium will increase/decrease (as will the price of Bitcoin).
So in short, it isn’t profitable at the moment. I did try leaving it running on my work laptop (as it runs fine with 3 of the 4 logical processors in use and I’m not paying the electricity) but the mining program is blocked by my companies VPN, which I always need to access when working.
I will do the same tests with some other CPU based cryptographic currencies.
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