Is it now feasible to mine on a Amazon EC2/GPU instance?

[MagicMan187]

I've been reading around recently and found that in the past, people thought it was not feasible to mine on a EC2/GPU instance, but with the rapid increase in the price of a bitcoin, would it now be feasible to mine on a EC2/GPU instance and make a profit.

I can understand the difficulty of mining bitcoins have gotten harder, but the price has increased so dramatically over the last few months that surely you could make a small profit to mine of a EC2/GPU instance (or cluster of instance's).

How about even if just using it to supplement your current mining rigs?

I have some promotional credit on AWS and also have access to some seriously powerful servers at work (which are hardly hitting 5% utilization!!), so I could easily setup a script to mine on these in the night (My work dont like scaling instances up/down (even tho thats the main selling point of AWS!!)).

So I was just wondering, has anyone done this / doing this? (Recently specifically.. reflecting the price increase in the prior week)

At the time of writing 1 BTC is over $1000 (USD)!

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[mindfulmojo]

I'm not sure the technical details about what you are talking about... 

But, using anything but an asic, application-specific integrated circuit, is futile.

It does sound like you have the perfect setup for mining alt coins though.. 

And/or you could try running this as well... http://cloud.mql5.com/

[baocin]

Probably not since the difficulty of bit coin generation has increased along with the price. Depending on the ec2 instance you decide to get it might be negligibly profitable but too little to make real money from bitcoin. New alt coins though might be interesting but remember that scrypt based currencies require a good bit of ram when deciding on instances.

[btc_shell]

why doesn't someone tell him the truth??

Why are you all ignoring his question about litecoin and trying to steer him away from EC2 because you can't compete with asics on BTC?

Yes, you can mine LTC with EC2, it has been discussed on these boards in depth up until about six months ago when it was decided it wasn't worth it.  Now LTC as we know is worth around 20x what it was!  BTC- no.  LTC and other scrypt based coins-presumably yes.

I am so much wanting to try it out on there new C3 instance with 32 Vcores!  but... for some reason Amazon won't let me sign up.  I've no idea why other than that my cell phone (only phone) is registered in my company name and when I try to sign up, my account gets placed on hold, send in documents... etc. ((  I did scan a utility bill and no word from them.  B*strds.  I want to try it.

So... someone. Please fire up an EC2 c3.xlarge8x instance and use cpuminer , minerd and report back!  Some of us really want to know...

and for those of you trying to steer the OP away from the idea by distracting him with you BTC bull, which we already knew-  shame on you all for being so greedy.

[michikade]

I'm not so sure you would be able to scrape a profit with BTC through this setup, but you'd probably do just fine with a sound profit mining for an altcoin.  I don't think your setup is futile, necessarily, but I'm of the opinion that you would be able to mine a significantly higher amount of altcoins that you could then exchange to BTC or cash should you choose to.

Course, the way I see it --

If you have promotional credit and you aren't the one footing the electricity bill, and if your workplace doesn't care if you mine on those servers, you wouldn't actually be /out of pocket/ for any of it so even if you just make a little bit, it's still profit.