Hacker News Reader

It would be really stupid to mine bitcoins. I assume they were mining litecoins or some other more GPU/CPU friendly coin.

Why ? It's slow but it cost them nothing ...

Because they can make money much faster with litecoin.

To illustrate this, EC2 GPU instances have a NVIDIA Kepler GK104 with 1536 cores, so that is like the GTX680. It gets 120 MHash/s on bitcoin, which translates to 2 cents per month.

It gets 207 kHash/s on litecoin, which translates to 32 cents per month.

I think on vertcoin you could get 90 cents per month.

Wow the effectiveness of GPU for mining Bitcoin has dropped dramatically since last time I looked at it (admittedly a couple years ago).

If I remember well you could make a few hundred bucks a month with just one high end ATI graphic card.

Amazon support told me (at least the ones spun up on my account), where indeed bit-coin miners.

I now use bitbucket.