How to Mine Zcash on Amazon EC2

If your mining to suprnova your hashrate should be visible in less than a minute

It did start the miner and looked like it was mining

It seems to me that the only pool with instructions that worked is zmine but you can’t see your direct stats there

Suprnova and Flypool work aswell

i haven’t tried flypool yet, see how that goes

Anyone benchmarked all the AWS instances? I’d be surprised if this works out to be a good investment (even the cloud mining contracts are cheaper than a spot priced giving 16 Sol/s) Mining on VPS hosts (Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr)

Nothing to be surprised about, this is not rocket science.

Toomin Bros:
16 Sol/s for 90 days
Must commit for at least 90 days
Price: 1.2000 BT or ($660*1.2 = $792)

AWS:
16 Sol/s for 90 days (with open source CPU miner)
Must commit for at least one hour.
Price: ($0.102490 = $216)

Either option is too expensive; but AWS is the clear winner here.

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What instance type are you getting that on (spot prices can be wildlyvariable)?

Yeh, I was comparing to Genesis Mining which is the cheapest currently (albeit a 12 month contract) with that calculation for 1 H/s it’s cheaper than your spot pricing. For 1 year on AWS you are looking at (8765 x 0.1)/16 = $54.78 whereas 1H/s at GM for a year is (1/0.6) x 29 = $48

I’m not even including the extra free month of GM in that comparison which makes it even less nor the variance in spot prices (I’ll look up historic spot prices if you let me know instance types).

I definitely don’t think cloud contracts are a brilliant deal (particualy when compared to owning hardware) but I do think they are actually a good use case when compared to mining on VPS providers.

I have 3 instance types running.

m4.large = 1.90 Sol/s
c4.large = 2.2 Sol/s
t2.medium (after burning credits) = 0.25 Sol/s

Thanks for that. So on current spot pricing:

m4.large = $0.0141/h for 1.9 Sol/s = $65 for 1H/s for a year
c4.large = $0.0161/h for 2.2 Sol/s = $64 for 1H/s for a year
t2.medium = no spot pricing data on this but reserved instance all upfront is $302 for 0.25 Sol/s = $1209 for 1H/s for a year

All more expensive than GM (which is actually effectively $44.3 if you include that 13th month.

Obviously the major benefit here would be the shorter contract lengths.

Don’t count on rates being that low when Zcash launches :wink:

Yes exactly this is best case :grin: Not to mention the hassle of dealing with spot instances.I don’t see any of these VPS solutions being remotely viable.

Is this all necessary?

I have an untweaked amazon instance running and seemingly connected fine. Do you really need to perform all of these steps with AWS?

Cloud contracts have their place just like everything else. But how do you assess the value of a contract when the network has not even launched yet, and not a single token traded? It is best to wait and collect useful information after the launch before purchasing one of these contracts.

I completely agree and am merely making the comparison between services that already exist i.e. some might be throwing money at reserved instances on AWS. I’m urging caution towards any of these services and to run the numbers not advocating people run out and buy cloud contracts!

That makes sense.

An obvious positive for Amazon is the short term commitment. You can exit and look for better options as soon as profitability begin to head downhill.

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Hi,
I followed the guide as of today having set up a brand new EC2 instance. I’m seeing
“errors” : “WARNING: check your network connection, 0 blocks received in the last 4 hours (96 expected)”
when I run zcash-cli getinfo.
I checked the port 18232 using this (TCP port checker) and the IP address from the EC2 console and it says "connection refused.

I am on v1.0.0-rc1

I’m having a lot of trouble finding a solution to this. any help would be reallllll nice.

its because you are on v1.0.0-rc1. try -rc4

I just dropped a 100% hands-off AMI for AWS to do solo mining and run fullnode wallets at:
http://zcash.mercerweiss.com

AMI IDs for all AWS regions are at that url

worked wonderfully. thanks