How to mine Ethereum using Amazon Web Services (AWS)

in ethereum •  8 years ago  (edited)

So, a while ago I wanted to mine Ethereum, and I wanted to mine it FAST.

At the time, I was not too fussed about spending a couple of dollars to get a mining rig up and running, but I did not have the capacity to do it using my laptop (it just didn't have powerful enough GPU) so I started to look into some cloud mining options.

I quickly stumbled onto cloud mining using AWS - you see, the cool thing about AWS is that I don't have to worry about any hardware, keeping it cool, upgrading, storage bla bla the whole thing, all I need to do is spin up some of my instances, and voila! I am mining.

I followed this tutorial, I hope you guys find it helpful:
https://github.com/angelomilan/ethereum-guides/blob/master/GPU-cloud_mining.md

I got about 25/MHs and was costing me about $25/day, it wasn't exactly profitable at the time. But the cool thing was/is, is if ETH skyrockets to $100 overnight, I could spin up as many instances as I want, and I would assume that would be very profitable. So, it is all just sitting there, ready to go.

Here is a mining calculator, so you can work out how much you would earn with a specific hashrate.
https://etherscan.io/ether-mining-calculator

If you have any questions, let me know below. also I would be happy to set these cloud rigs up for people, contact me if you are interested and we can work out a price for setup so you can have your own on tap 24/7 cloud mining rig.

I think if you changed to AWS spot pricing, you could make this profitable with a price rise in ETH. AWS spot pricing allows you to spin up instances at a much lower rate (sometiemes 70% lower) than normal $ market rates, but at the cost of uptime -if your offer falls below market rates, your instance is stopped - something I was not happy with when trying to mine.

One thing I did change from the guide was instead of having to start each GPU separately, on different screens, start them all at once on one screen via: ethminer --farm-recheck 400 -G -F http://127.0.0.1:8545 (as per https://gist.github.com/jmiehau/0470ef3262d83987221e)

That way you can definitely confirm all GPU are running via the output:

ℹ 10:07:27|gpuminer0 workLoop 1 #aec7cfe5 #aec7cfe5

ℹ 10:07:27|gpuminer1 workLoop 1 #aec7cfe5 #aec7cfe5

ℹ 10:07:27|gpuminer2 workLoop 1 #aec7cfe5 #aec7cfe5

ℹ 10:07:27|gpuminer3 workLoop 1 #aec7cfe5 #aec7cfe5

Happy mining!

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Hey thanks for this! Wanted to know if you had an update here. I'm sitting on 100k of free AWS credits and want to maximize them.

How did you get that credit ?

  ·  8 years ago Reveal Comment
  ·  8 years ago (edited)

Very nice, thanks for sharing. I'll definitely look into that once I get a minute.

  ·  8 years ago (edited)

No worries! I hope it goes well for you, if you have troubles let me know and I will try to help if I can. I would say it is more profitable at the moment just to BUY Ethereum (see my post on Coinbase), but it was fun just to be a miner for a while.

Have account AWS?

Yes you need an AWS account, yes I have one.

You can get one too:
https://aws.amazon.com/

Great post!

I managed to get this working, but with limited knowledge, am having trouble connecting to a pool.

Additionally, would you need to add a script to your AWS Instances for restarting mining after a spot instance is terminated?

It might also be cool to include an automated feature that calculates the spot price, the ETH price, and if it is profitable to mine or stop if not.

Thanks

Did you ever figure this out?

Is it still possible to mine on AWS now?? I heard if they find out your account gonna get flagged?