I tend to agree with
this post that there cannot be a long-term future for multiple cryptocurrencies which have the same basis. The exception is perhaps LiteCoin given that it uses a different algorithm, though even then you have to question its long term potential against BTC.
Regardless, I am a LiteCoin miner mainly because I have some free CPU resource to burn. I own and run a
cloud IaaS company and our virtual machine hosts are lightly loaded (CPU isn't generally in demand compared with RAM and disk I/O transactions per second) so I have been experimenting with using up the spare compute with mining. It actually works quite well!
On one of our older, fairly heavily loaded VM hosts (a quad-Xeon X3323 2.5GHz) it took the power consumption from about 120W to 140W. The worker cannot affect its neighbors thanks to our fair scheduling tech and it is doing about 26 kHash/sec. That's about 1.32/month, or at the current exchange rate ($2.95/LTC) about $3.89/month. The cost power plus a margin for data centre cooling and wotnot is about $0.15/kWh, so 20W for a month is:
(20 Watts x 24 hours x 30.4 days ) / 1,000 Watts = 14.6 kWh * $0.15/kWh = $2.19/month
On one of our newer hex-core 1.9GHz E5-2420 hosts the power increment is about the same at 20 Watts (though they are more power efficient, peaking at 100W vs. 140W for the X3323) I'm getting 30-40 kHash/sec.
An experiment I want to try next is using cloud compute GPU resources for this sort of mining to see if it is cost effective. I'm sure its been done, but what the hell! :p
Anyway just thought I'd share. Was waiting to post on the appropriate forum but it is taking forever to get whitelisted.
Kate.
