Ethereum Mining on Amazon AWS

In short, ethereum mining on Amazon AWS is not profitable. However, if you are interested in ethereum mining, the following content would be a good tutorial.

1 Setup your ETH wallet

There are plenty of choices for ETH wallet, take a look at this review and setup your own wallet address.

The Top 10 Best Ethereum Wallets (2018 Edition)

2 Request spot instance

The instances with high-performance GPU are in type p2, p3, g2, g3.

In Security Groups settings, open port 22 for SSH connection, and open both UDP and TCP connection on port 30303 for mining.

For AMI, choose Canonical, Ubuntu, 16.04 LTS.

3 Install software

Update available package list:

$ sudo apt-get update

Upgrade installed packages:

$ sudo apt-get upgrade

Install the required drivers for your video card:

$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-cuda-toolkit

Install tmux, your miner will continue working after you logout SSH:

$ sudo apt-get install tmux

Download the latest version of ethminer:

$ wget https://github.com/ethereum-mining/ethminer/releases/download/v0.14.0.dev1/ethminer-0.14.0.dev1-Linux.tar.gz

Extract file:

$ tar zxvf ethminer-0.14.0.dev1-Linux.tar.gz

Change to the directory with executable miner file, and start mining.

Here, I choose ethermine.org pool, which is the largest ETH mining pool at this time.

$ cd bin/
$ ./ethminer --farm-recheck 200 -U -S us1.ethermine.org:4444 -FS us1.ethermine.org:14444 -O 7B1a81A6E4F62055f9c1b7d6CA15e41caa6e0663

Notice 7B1a81A6E4F62055f9c1b7d6CA15e41caa6e0663 should be replaced by your ethereum address.

• --farm-recheck determines how often to check for work
• -U says to use CUDA, if you want to use OpenCL, replace it with -G
• -S/--stratum and -FS/--failover-stratum are the remote nodes I connect to
• replace 7B1a81A6E4F62055f9c1b7d6CA15e41caa6e0663 with your own ethereum address after -O

After a moment, you can monior your mining status here:

https://ethermine.org/miners/7B1a81A6E4F62055f9c1b7d6CA15e41caa6e0663

4 Comparison

Instance type	GPU type	# of GPUs	Hash rate	Spot price (USD)	Annual price (USD)
g2.2xlarge	NVIDIA GRID K520	1	4.8 Mh/s/GPU	0.204 /h	372.30 /Mh/s
g3.4xlarge	NVIDIA Tesla M60	1	8.1 Mh/s/GPU	0.4302 /h	465.25 /Mh/s
p2.8xlarge	NVIDIA Tesla K80	8	7 Mh/s/GPU	2.16 /h	337.89 /Mh/s
p3.2xlarge	NVIDIA Tesla V100	1	94.8 Mh/s/GPU	1.2733 /h	117.66 /Mh/s