Is it profitable to use these for mining cryptocurrency?
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...
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.
Love to hear your thoughts on this!
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.