hi all,
now for the ‘not waste of time’ version of mining zcash on amazon ec2.
use spot instances, around 32-64 cpus is fine.
paste the below into userdata, when setting up yr instances (this mines against zec.suprnova.cc)
have fun,
james
#!/bin/bash
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y cmake build-essential libboost-all-dev git
git clone https://github.com/ocminer/nheqminer.git
cd nheqminer/nheqminer
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
./nheqminer -u <username.worker>
to mine against other pools, replace the 4th line with: git clone https://github.com/feeleep75/nheqminer.git
and the last line with: ./nheqminer -l <poolname:port> -u <username.worker> -p x
so it looks like: ./nheqminer -l zec.coinmine.pl:7007 -u barrystyle.1 -p x
I agree, mining on AWS is definitely not profitable now. I wrote this guide back during the alpha releases – so people could use it for testing.
At the time of this writing, one can expect to lose about 60 cents for every dollar they put into mining on EC2. This assumes the current price, network hashrate, spot prices, immediate sales, etc etc.
All of those variables change quickly, but I think it’s safe to say that mining on EC2 isn’t profitable right now.
I’m really interested in trying out cryptocurrency mining, but if mining on AWS is no longer profitable how is a complete beginner/noob meant to mine zcash?
It is when you share your hashing powers with other people and then split the reward equally, according to the amount of work everyone done to solving a block.
If you have small hash power - it is the only option to mine.
Interesting @iamniks can you suggest any resources for me to learn more about it this, I’d like to start pool mining zcash but have no idea where to start, where to find trustworthy mining pools and how to contribute value to them etc
Just a head’s up. Pool mining DOES NOT increase your expected payout. It only lowers your variance.
So instead of getting one huge payout every several months, you get a bunch of tiny payouts every few hours (as an example). But the total amount of money you’ll make mining will be the same (in the long run) either way.
Pool mining is better in that you’ll actually see coins sooner. But it WILL NOT make your price per coin any lower than solo mining.
So yeah, if you are going to mine, you should probably pool mine. But mining right now is nowhere near profitable on AWS – pool or no pool.
I just want to make sure everyone is aware of that. This is a very easy space in which to lose a lot of money very, very quickly.
^^^^^^what he said, and I second that emotion as an enabler of AWS mining who put out a turnkey Zcash For AWS AMI distro!
That’s why I switched it to boot by default into just running a fullnode, for hosting your own zcash instance as a wallet, because you can rack up a really high AWS bill really fast, all for nothing
I have been playing with mining on spot instances, with help from this thread - mostly just to sharpen my AWS and bash chops and have fun, not because I expect to make any profit. I have my scripts to the point where they can automatically check the spot prices, spin up instances, detect the number of cpu cores, and start up feeleep75/nheqminer with a worker named after the instance type. I just finished benchmarking c3 vs c4 instances, and c4 performs about 70% better for the same cost, due to newer hardware and AVX2 capabilities.
What other instance types would you guys suggest trying out? I am curious about high GPU instances as well but not sure what the best miner software is for GPU on linux. Thanks!
I’m wondering what the best miner for NVIDIA is myself, as that’s what you’d have to use for AWS…I’m looking to see what open source one falls out of the cracks in the next week or so
This looks to be nvidia compatible: Open Source ZEC (ZCash) GPU Miner AMD & NVidia (up to 45 sol/s on RX480) though it probably performs better on AMD. It also uses a proprietary protocol and doesn’t yet support stratum. Hopefully things will shake out in the next few days as like you said.
That sounds great. I’ve been working on a script of my own, but I like some
of your features better than my own. I assign random worker names (for
example), but I really like the idea of using the instance id instead.
Mind sharing how you are grabbing your instance type from command line?
Perhaps there is a similar way to grab the worker id?
I’d like to see the GPU instances benchmarked too. Also the r3 instance
types (just out of curiosity).
Unfortunately flypool is the only pool I have found that supports these arbitrary worker names and their stats seem to be way off. Do you know of any others with this feature? Another part of my script retrieves the next available worker from MPOS based pools using their API, but the workers still need to exist ahead of time which makes it far less valuable.