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Comment by bobf | Hacker News Reader

I'm the author of the post. I didn't include a lot of background detail because I wanted to publish the technically interesting bits quickly. As I see it, mining LiteCoins on EC2 is currently profitable because of four main factors:

1) Bitcoin's recent dramatic increase in value. (LiteCoin's value is heavily correlated to Bitcoin's.)

2) The relatively low difficulty level for LiteCoin mining right now.

3) Spot instance pricing for the EC2 GPU (g2.2xlarge) instances.

4) LiteCoin can be mined using both GPUs and CPUs (although GPUs are dramatically better, another ~35 khashes/sec from the CPUs is still nice).

Interestingly, the previous average historical spot price for these instances was ~$0.075/hour. The spot pricing has now jumped to $0.10-$0.12, depending on region.

As an added bonus, you may be able to get $100 of AWS credit at http://aws.amazon.com/big-data/powerof60/ which would give you 2-3 free days of mining.

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> 1) Bitcoin's recent dramatic increase in value. (LiteCoin's value is heavily correlated to Bitcoin's.)

No, actually, Litecoin's value is very different from that of Bitcoin and in the last week or two it skyrocketed from being 0.015/BTC to 0.05/BTC and back down to 0.04/BTC or so.

As a result of your post, in just 2-3 hours, the spot price on AWS went to $0.20 per instance.

An interesting economic effect of this - prior to your article, the mining profits were flowing to the miners who figured this out on AWS. After your article, the profits are now flowing to the reserved instance owners instead. Bastard.

Just so everyone is aware, I filled out the form for the $100 and got the message: "Thank you. An Amazon Web Services representative will contact you." Ugh.

Nobody had to contact me to get a free $100 for EC2, but I used the education grant instead when I did a Coursera class (http://aws.amazon.com/grants/). I have $70.99 leftover from when I got this free $100, so I will use that and try not to go too much over.

Litecoin's value is related to Bitcoin's, but it's not a perfect correlation by any means. The market for Litecoins is even smaller than Bitcoin's, and the coins are concentrated in even fewer hands.

If I were doing this, I'd sell the coins as soon as I got them. Even moreso than Bitcoin, with Litecoin the value is unstable and subject to crash at any moment.

Reading this: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

seems like price has increased to 0.65(?!) per hour. That doesn't sound profitable.

edit: never mind, didn't notice this was about spot instances.

Could the spot price increase also relate to "black friday" related usage?

It could, but we're talking about a specific GPU instance in this case. I wouldn't see an obvious correlation between Black Friday and the g2.2xlarge instance type.

Do you have the step by step instructions on how to do this?

So the max out of pocket is $2 an hour if I bid $0.20?

I am seeing:

Current price us-west-1a 0.101 us-west-1c 0.75

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