1) Bitcoin's recent dramatic increase in value. (LiteCoin's value is heavily correlated to Bitcoin's.)
2) The relatively low difficulty level for LiteCoin mining right now.
3) Spot instance pricing for the EC2 GPU (g2.2xlarge) instances.
4) LiteCoin can be mined using both GPUs and CPUs (although GPUs are dramatically better, another ~35 khashes/sec from the CPUs is still nice).
Interestingly, the previous average historical spot price for these instances was ~$0.075/hour. The spot pricing has now jumped to $0.10-$0.12, depending on region.
As an added bonus, you may be able to get $100 of AWS credit at http://aws.amazon.com/big-data/powerof60/ which would give you 2-3 free days of mining.
No, actually, Litecoin's value is very different from that of Bitcoin and in the last week or two it skyrocketed from being 0.015/BTC to 0.05/BTC and back down to 0.04/BTC or so.
As a result of your post, in just 2-3 hours, the spot price on AWS went to $0.20 per instance.
An interesting economic effect of this - prior to your article, the mining profits were flowing to the miners who figured this out on AWS. After your article, the profits are now flowing to the reserved instance owners instead. Bastard.
If I were doing this, I'd sell the coins as soon as I got them. Even moreso than Bitcoin, with Litecoin the value is unstable and subject to crash at any moment.
seems like price has increased to 0.65(?!) per hour. That doesn't sound profitable.
edit: never mind, didn't notice this was about spot instances.
Current price us-west-1a 0.101 us-west-1c 0.75
Seriously, with all the hype, I got suckered into buying bitcoin/litecoin just to realize that I can't compete against Chinese miners.
I guess I could buy coins and sit on them but there is no fun in doing so. Arbitrage is practically impossible because of the lag time to pull hard cash from the exchanges.
in life, studying code is what has netted me the most cash that i feel proud of earning
Just keep the bitcoins you bought and thank HN in 10 years for making you rich.
Btw Bitcoin is also very interesting from a technical point of view.
If the NSA is "too political" for HN, then Bitcoin is "too get rich quick without working" for HN.
Isn't it worth looking at creative ways to go around this 10 instances limit?
> Currently litecoins are only used as a ponzi scheme
What? I'm not really a fan of Litecoin but you can't just make false claims.
Is this still profitable? I'll pay 20 bucks to someone who can set this up for me and record it.
