How to Mine Zcash on Amazon EC2

Thank you, Austin-Williams, excellent guide!

I did a performance benchmark of all compute optimized instance on AWS.
https://dipanjan.me/zcash-mining-benchmark-aws/

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Ok so I read through this forum. I see that EC2 is possibly no longer profitable, but that just depends on Zcashā€™s price and where it might be someday. (Bitcoin prices possibly)

I also see ZERO Balance on my GETINFO command and ran for a day. I ran a 64 cpu instance, I just changed the zcash.conf file to reflect 64 cpus. This is correct right? As long it finds a block eventually i will get a balance right?

Also, does generating a T and Z address after I finished affect me at all? I used OPTION 3 and want to mine everything to 1 address. I then made and image of my instance. I am just waiting for my BALANCE To go up from 0.0000

I do see the CPU monitoring at close to 100 % so I figure its working. :frowning: Im so sadā€¦ my bill is $200 already and I have a zero balance.

One more thing, does changing the rpcusername: to my custom name and Password matter? Does it have to be rpcuser?

I just want to make sure its mining.

It sounds like you are solo mining with zcashd, correct? If thatā€™s the case, you donā€™t want to use more than a 4 cpu instance, as the way that the equihash solvers work, they end up flushing cache a lot, and performance beyond 4 cpuā€™s doesnā€™t scale.

The difficulty is so hight now, that I am not at all surprised you havenā€™t found a block yet, especially cpu mining. AWS mining right now is a losing proposition.

So no 64 cpu mining? It just wont work?

Also in the conf file, any rpcuser and pass is fine right?

And just set the cpu value to 4 then? Either way I am learning and hoping to snag a coin.

Yes I am solo mining.

well you donā€™t want to use an instance type with more than 4 cpusā€¦any rpcuser and pass should be fine, yes, see the current zcash User Guide

If you set the number of cpus in the conf file to -1 it will mine with as many threads as there are cpus

I guess -1 doesnt matter at this point right? Just set it to 4. Also, do you recommend jumping on ZClassic coin? I am considering doing it also.

while I"m not affiliated with ZcashCo in any official capacity, Iā€™ve done the ports to Mac and arm64ā€¦so Iā€™m just going to not give an opinion on Zclassic

I see the guide to build the Zclassic wallet in linux. I can solo mine zclassic the same way right? I only see pool guides and no solo guides for that coin.

Basically do the same thing in the conf to solo mine?

Iā€™d assume so, but i have no knowledge of zclassic, aside from people bugging me about building my mac port for it on the chat, and not being up front about what they are doing, and thereby wasting a lot of my time

Where can I find out this current value of Zclassic? Bittrex: 0.00201006 BTC Any online calculators?

Also I realize the 4 CPU thing you told me is BS. You just want me to mine low and slowā€¦ lol

dude, I donā€™t mine, I donā€™t care how you mine or not! Benchmark it yourself and see how many solutions/second you get on different instance types, when you double the number of CPUs past four, the number of solutions/second does NOT double. You stated that you already flushed $200 down the drain, I was just trying to help you not flush more. For that money you could have bought a GPU thatā€™d do much better!

yeah i just could see what you mentioned in the documentation or guide to told me to reference. I actually have two ATI R9 270X cards that are nice. I didnt know I can do GPU

there are tons of threads on here about all the different GPU miners, you probably want to pool mine on your GPUā€™s!

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