Cloud mining : is Google Compute Engine a game changer ?

[dsaunier]

Hi all

Relative newbie on this forum, but interested in Bitcoin for over a year, and in ecurrencies for 10 ;-)
I was interested given my line of work in trying experiments in the cloud, but seem to have found out that it's not worth it on Amazon.
Simple newbie question then, as Google Compute Engine is now much more accessible (announced at Google I/O), I was wondering if that would let someone mine on such remote tools ?
Could that be a game changer ?

Ref: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.fr/2013/05/ushering-in-next-generation-of.html

Thanks !

[esenminer]

The google cloud engine are virtual instances of linux so you would be cpu mining - if you started an 8-core diskless instance it would cost about $0.52 per hour (see n1-highcpu-8 in https://cloud.google.com/pricing/compute-engine) and assuming they had the best processor possible you might (but not likely) be able to get 100mh/s for bitcoin. At today's difficulty and prices you would earn about $0.50 per day and end up losing $12 a day. Litecoin would be even worse as you would only make about $0.30 a day.

You would currently break even if either Bitcoin price were 24 times it's current value say $2688 / bitcoin with the same difficulty or the difficulty went down 470000 (4% of it's current value) and the price remained the same.

You can rent time on GPUs on Amazon EC2 and several other companies but the GPUs they typically rent are Tesla M2050 which hash around 100 mh/s making it unprofitable.

[dsaunier]

Very clarifying and thorough, thanks. I guess the business of videocards- or dedicated-asics- in-the-cloud remains to be created :-)

[odetopsyche]

The only viable options I've seen are:

Cloudhashing.com (The price makes sense... against mining calculator I checked a few days ago, it should make ~$1600 a year if you spend $999 for the silver contract.

Digitalocean.com - Because the price is only .005 an hour for a linux machine, you can make a little money each month if you mine primecoin and sometimes memorycoin, but their price drops are hurting the profitability.

Also, butterflylabs is offering a $10/GH, which makes financial sense at current price of ~630. Still, this is only a pre-order option. (The $30/GH option through nimbus doesn't make sense).

[softron]

Has anyone tried mining there, i need to know if they allow bitcoin mining.

[odolvlobo]

The only viable options I've seen are:

Cloudhashing.com (The price makes sense... against mining calculator I checked a few days ago, it should make ~$1600 a year if you spend $999 for the silver contract.

You need a better mining calculator. You are paying cloudhashing about 1.5 BTC for that silver contract and you'll be lucky if it mines 1 BTC. Try this calculator: https://cex.io/calc

In general, it is better to price mining costs in BTC because mining produces BTC, and pricing in BTC makes it easier to determine if mining is worthwhile.

[Dannie]

In general, it is better to price mining costs in BTC because mining produces BTC, and pricing in BTC makes it easier to determine if mining is worthwhile.

Well said.
If the mining profit comes from the increasing bitcoin price, you should simply buy some bitcoin now and you would get better profit from it.

[MonkeyDOH]

OF course "Google Compute Engine" could be a game changer, dsaunier.

[odolvlobo]

It will not be a game changer. Google is not going to provide CPU processing for less than it costs, and mining Bitcoins is much more expensive using a CPU than either a GPU or an ASIC.

However, their economy-of-scale may allow them to provide CPU processing for less than the equivalent would cost an individual, so it might be game-changing for CPU-only alt coins such as QRK and XPM.

[cp1]

Doesn't amazon already sell computational time?  Why would google's be game-changing?

[b!z]

Doesn't amazon already sell computational time?  Why would google's be game-changing?

neither of them are worth using for mining anyways.