LiteCoin Mining on EC2 is currently profitable

I&#x27;m the author of the post. I didn&#x27;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:<p>1) Bitcoin&#x27;s recent dramatic increase in value. (LiteCoin&#x27;s value is heavily correlated to Bitcoin&#x27;s.)<p>2) The relatively low difficulty level for LiteCoin mining right now.<p>3) Spot instance pricing for the EC2 GPU (g2.2xlarge) instances.<p>4) LiteCoin can be mined using both GPUs and CPUs (although GPUs are dramatically better, another ~35 khashes&#x2F;sec from the CPUs is still nice).<p>Interestingly, the previous average historical spot price for these instances was ~$0.075&#x2F;hour. The spot pricing has now jumped to $0.10-$0.12, depending on region.<p>As an added bonus, you may be able to get $100 of AWS credit at <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/big-data/powerof60/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;big-data&#x2F;powerof60&#x2F;</a> which would give you 2-3 free days of mining.

Ok, the plethora of bitcoin&#x2F;litecoin articles on HN news are making me sick now. I feel like there are 3+ articles about it at any given time.<p>Seriously, with all the hype, I got suckered into buying bitcoin&#x2F;litecoin just to realize that I can&#x27;t compete against Chinese miners.<p>I guess I could buy coins and sit on them but there is no fun in doing so. Arbitrage is practically impossible because of the lag time to pull hard cash from the exchanges.

Of course, it won&#x27;t be profitable for long, now that the secret&#x27;s out. :-)

Why would you publish something like this? Why not just ride on your own discovery, get as many instances as possible and get rich?

I&#x27;m not seeing the g2.2xlarge instance type when I select Amazon Linux AMI 2013.09.1 - has Amazon disabled this instance type or am I missing something?

Damn discovered this two days ago, hoped that I went under radar for a bit :-).

I&#x27;m getting hung up when trying to install the CUDA installer. I get the error &quot;The driver installation is unable to locate the kernel source.&quot;.

How long did it take the pending to stop? Also, how do we SSH into the instances once pending is over? I cannot seem to find a way to launch.

Unfortunately due to the spike in EC2 prices this doesn&#x27;t really seem much profitable anymore...but still awesome nonetheless!

Naive question from a non-techie - if i were to run 10 g2.2xlarge spot instances, how much net profit per day would i make?

I bit skeptical of wemineltc.com (no https)

Someone should probably try this with Amazon&#x27;s first year free offer.. I will probably try this out.

Whats the deal here?<p>Is this still profitable? I&#x27;ll pay 20 bucks to someone who can set this up for me and record it.

Spot instance price is rising at about 2 cents&#x2F;hour. By 11AM UTC, it&#x27;ll be unprofitable.

Does any body know how to mine litecoin on amazon step by step from scratch?

Looks like the spot prices have already jumped to $0.175 - $0.2 per hour

it costs only your <i>mind</i>

The problem though is that while buying&#x2F;selling bitcoins is just hard, exchanging litecoins is practically impossible. Currently litecoins are only used as a ponzi scheme, rather than a payment method and if anybody does what OP suggests, please be smart and cash out as fast as you can. You can cash out to bitcoins if that floats your boat, at least they are actually used for things other than being a scam.