All you need to start mining in Etherium is an AWS EC2 instance.
You have probably heard something about the rapidly growing popularity of cryptocurrencies. Slowly but surely, cryptocurrencies are changing the way financial systems and transactions work (in my opinion, such systems should continue to work, assimilating with new trends).
Not so long ago the value of Bitcoin reached $6000, at that the market capitalization of this cryptocurrency now amounts to $103 billion, as well as hundreds of ICOs (Initial coin offering) performed since August of this year. Needless to say, there has been a huge economic boom in the Bitcoin world during this time, which will probably not subside anytime soon.
As you can see in the chart below, the total capitalization of cryptocurrencies has grown from $50 billion to $150 in just one year.
Personally, I like the Ethereum project best, where it’s easy enough to start mining using AWS. I want to dedicate this article to this very topic – mining.
Before we get to the main topic, I suggest that we first get acquainted with the basic concepts. In case you already know about this platform and mining, you can safely skip the introductory part.
What is Etherium?
Etherium is an open, blockchain-based software platform that allows developers to create and deploy decentralized applications. The main advantage of Etherium over Bitcoin is that the former provides support for various types of decentralized applications.
Etherium ranks second after Bitcoin in terms of market capitalization scale. For example, in the past year alone, the value of the Etherium platform has increased by 230%, as seen in the chart below:
Nevertheless, the increase in price growth implies an increase in the demands placed on the miners who work on the Etherium platform, which in turn inevitably leads to an increase in the complexity of the mining process:
If it just so happens that you started working with the Etherium platform in May of this year, you’ve probably felt how much more complicated the mining process has become today.
What is crypto-mining?
The word “mining” itself is a kind of analog of gold mining in the field of cryptocurrencies. In a nutshell: mining cryptocurrencies is solving complex mathematical problems. Miners, in turn, are people who spend all their time and energy on solving such problems. Miners provide their solutions to those who validate such solutions. The miners then receive a well-deserved reward: a block of Ether. As you might have guessed by now, the more complex the mining process, the more complex the mathematical problems that need to be solved become, and the harder it is to get the reward for the solutions found. At the moment, due to the extraordinary popularity and demand for Etherium, the complexity of mining for this platform is also reaching its maximum.
Is it even worthwhile to engage in mining in Etherium?
As it happens, the more miners join Etherium, the more difficult the task and the process of mining itself becomes. Then you ask, “Well, should I even start mining if the time for a good start has already been missed?” You should know that the value of the platform is constantly increasing, so the value of its currency, however small, could grow to enormous proportions in the future.
However, there have been some changes in Etherium: not so long ago, the proof-of-stake method was introduced for this platform. This means that the process of mining will not mean much anymore. Nevertheless, such innovations can lead to a sharp increase in the value of the cryptocurrency Etherium.
So, if you have had a chance to rethink all of the above information and are still ready to mine Etherium, then the rest of this article is just for you!
How do I run my own AWS instance for mining?
Just a few simple steps:
- Go to your AWS EC2 console and change your region to US East (N.Virginia) . This county has the lowest cost for the services we need, and it also has an AMI community where we can find the mining libraries we need installed.
- Under Instances, select Spot Instances and click Request Spot Instances.
- Find an AMI community called ami-cb384fdd and select it.
- Under the Instance column, select g2.8xlarge.
- Run it!
Getting started with mining
In order to start mining, you need your own Etherium wallet and you must be part of a pool of miners. To create your wallet, go to www.myetherwallet.com and follow the instructions given. Once the registration process is complete, you will receive the address of your personal wallet.
For mining, we will use the Dwarfpool pool,. However, you can use any other pool. Here you can find a list of the most popular ones.
Just use SSH for this purpose and enter the following code:
> tmux
> ethminer -G -F http://eth-eu.dwarfpool.com/{WALLET ADDRESS}/{YOUR_EMAIL ADDRESS} --cl-local-work 256 --cl-global-work 16384With Tmux you can continue to perform all necessary processes even after the SSH connection has ended.
Ethminer is a GPU miner. Enter your e-mail address to receive notifications about payments made in the platform. Other settings are provided to optimize the mining process.
That’s all!
Soon the DAG-file will be created and right after that you can start mining.
My opinion is: due to its excessive complexity the process of mining in Etherium is not worth the candle if you decide to do it just now. For instance, one hour of g2.8xlarge will cost you $2.6, and the profits of an Etherium miner can also be as low as $2.6 per day!
Now no one can tell you for sure what the future holds for any of the current cryptocurrencies – maybe they will all burst like a bubble. There is also an opinion that selling cryptocurrency is a kind of lottery.
Nevertheless, being an optimist, I am more than confident that cryptocurrencies have a great future ahead, and the recent rapid development of Bitcoin and Etherium only confirms my assumptions. We should also not forget that mining is like a lottery, so a unit of cryptocurrency earned today can go up in value a hundred times in a year.