Bitcoin Forum

Other => Beginners & Help => Topic started by: factotumjack on October 16, 2011, 10:58:58 PM



Title: Exchanging BitCoins for Computations
Post by: factotumjack on October 16, 2011, 10:58:58 PM
I won't be doing much mining myself because my computer is already running BOINC. There's projects that I want to see done more than the mining. I'm assuming there are others with similar tradeoffs.

I've seen on the marketplace a lot of mining services for rental, but are commercial computing systems like Amazon.com's rent-a-grid buying or mining BTC?  As I see it, commercial grids could do that and then pay individual miners for CPU when their grid was over-capacity. Seeing as people are already set up to mine, would that be much different?

It seems like trading BTC for computing power would improve the market here and give commercial grids more flexibility to handle larger urgent jobs by buying outsourced CPU work later in exchange for spare CPU work now.

Perhaps this is already happening and I'm missing/misunderstanding something.  (Still a newbie).


Title: Re: Exchanging BitCoins for Computations
Post by: nmat on October 17, 2011, 02:55:35 AM
First you are missing the fact the nobody mines with CPUs. Only GPUs are used, specially if they are from ATI because Nvidia sucks at mining. Then you are overlooking the fact that mining is not  profitable for most people because of the electricity costs.

Amazon must have the datacenters at locations with cheap electricity so they could make some profits if they have ATI GPUs to rent. I am just not sure if this is something they want. You will have to talk to them, not us. With the decreasing price of bitcons and the time/money needed to coordinate the switch from mining to rental mode, they probably don't want to go through all the trouble of setting this up and then find out that there is nobody out there to buy their coins.

PS: Bitcoin is not a safe investment (we might not be here in a year because Bitcoin could be outlawed, prices could drop tremendously, etc). Big companies tend to avoid high risk investments like this.


Title: Re: Exchanging BitCoins for Computations
Post by: odysseus654 on October 17, 2011, 03:58:21 AM
Unless I'm reading this wrong, the current AWS:EC2 rates for "GPU Instances" ( 2 x NVIDIA Tesla “Fermi” M2050 GPUs ) :

Base on-demand: linux:$2.10/hr, windows:$2.60/hr
1yr Reserved: linux:$5630+0.74/hr, windows:$5630+$1.04/hr
3yr Reserved: linux:$8650+0.74/hr, windows:$8650+$1.04/hr
Current spot market value: linux:$0.74/hr, windows:not available

So...

(1) How many Mh/s are you likely to get with this hardware
(2) How many BTC/hr are you likely to get with this hardware
(3) How many BTC/$ are you likely to get with these prices?


Title: Re: Exchanging BitCoins for Computations
Post by: SippieCup on October 18, 2011, 07:52:17 AM
its a fermi Tesla design, so its the same basic architecture as an 5 series GTX, you would be looking at about 200MHash. As for the amount of money you will make.. you will be in the negative quite a bit.


Title: Re: Exchanging BitCoins for Computations
Post by: generickid on October 18, 2011, 04:27:28 PM
bitcoin seems like a solid solution for purchasing things IRL with less of a currency trail

but I agree the electricity costs would far exceed the value gained through mining with a GPU. I've never tried tbh but after reading a few guides it seems easier to just convert actual cash into bc