bitcoinminer

It is a vagrant project used to setup an Amazon EC2 cg1.4xlarge instance to mine bitcoin.

Someone said it makes no economic sense. But I don't believe it. Let's try. According to Amazon, there is a instance type called 'cg1.4xlarge' which has 2 * Intel Xeon X5570 and 2 * NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPU. It will cost you $2.1 per hour. Really expensive, right? However one bitcoin is worth $948.26. If we can mine 0.053 bitcoin per day, we can earn money from it.

So just do it!

Installation

• First you have to register an AWS account.
• Select EC2 and then select the 'N.Virginia' region (Only two regions support the cg1.4xlarge now)
• Create a keypair and download the private key
• Create a security group.
• Write down your account's access_id, access_key
• Clone this git repository. Edit the 'Vagrantfile'.

Vagrant.require_plugin "vagrant-aws"
  config.vm.provider :aws do |aws, override|
    aws.access_key_id = "<access_id>"
    aws.secret_access_key = "<access_key>"
    aws.keypair_name = "keypair"
    aws.instance_type = "cg1.4xlarge"
    # Amazon Linux AMI (HVM GPU / 64-bit)
    aws.ami = "ami-7f5d7016"
    aws.region = "us-east-1"
    aws.security_groups = ["security-group"]
    aws.tags = {
      'Name' => 'BitcoinMiner',
    }
    aws.user_data = File.read("cloud_init.txt")
    override.ssh.username = "ec2-user"
    override.ssh.private_key_path = "~/keys/keypair.pem"
  end

• Run the 'vagrant up' command in this repository directory. If everything is OK, you can see a new instance has been setup for you now.

  

  And required programs are already installed for you by vagrant script.

• Run the 'vagrant ssh' command to login. Change the 'mine.sh' script accourding to your information. You have to register a pool account at 'stratum.bitcoin.cz'

• Run the 'mine.sh'. It will start to mine bitcoin by using both CPUs and GPUs.

Am I rich now?

The cg1.4xlarge can mine bitcoin at the following speed ( Only test for 2 hours because I am really poor )

And I got the following bitcoin :

The 0.00000024 BTC is about $0.000228. But the cost for me is $4.2. My heart is broken.

Anyway, The highest GPU instance in AWS can only generate 95MHash/s. However a dedicated miner hardware can generate a lot higher MHash/s. See comparision table

If I am not wrong, that 95MHash/s can bring $0.000114/Hour, the EC2 should generate 1,750,000MHash/s to gain profit.

Third Party Tools

• Vagrant: A configurable lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments.
• Vagrant AWS Plugin: AWS provider for Vagrant.
• CPUMiner: The miner which uses CPU to mine bitcoin.
• poclbm: The miner which uses GPU to mine bitcoin.