[chanced]

The reason more people don't do it is because:

A) it's difficult. Since the vast majority of miners didn't get in early, they weren't able to get in on the "gold rush" that enabled them to ramp up hardware in accordance with their output. When mining first started, you could find blocks with a decent CPU. Since then, dedicated rigs have become almost a necessity if you plan to make any kind of money at all.

B) Electrical efficiency. Since the recent decrease (reduction from 50 bitcoin per block down to 25 per block) and the rise in popularity of bitcoin (thus rise in difficulty of finding a block.. it scales naturally), the "cost" of finding blocks has gone up. By that I mean it requires more raw computational power to mine, raising the bar on both the hardware needed to be relevant AND the amount of electricity consumed during the process.

There are a lot of calculators out there. They will give you some insight into how much you could make (or very likely lose) depending on your local electricity pricing.

[jyu]

A year ago, I entertained the idea of mining bitcoin, but with high electricity rates locally, the numbers and breakeven point didn't make sense. Long term edges in mining are based on specialized hardware and low electrical costs.

For me, it only made sense if bitcoin kept increasing in value, at which point it's much easier to just buy and speculate.

[adityaathalye]

I was wondering about BitCoin and global power price arbitrage just today... The market may not be big enough to make it a very lucrative thing, but I still think it'll be a cool experiment to try. Especially since the computing requirements will only get more rigourous. Longer post here: http://adityaathalye.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/bitcoin-and-gl... [deleted previous comment - mistakenly added reply to comment one level higher]

[agracey]

Could you use something like AWS or EC2 to reduce the overhead?

[dustcoin]

No. CPUs are useless for mining, and the only GPU instance AWS offers uses Nvidia GPUs, which are about 5x worse than the equivalent AMD/ATI GPUs. Even if AWS had AMD/ATI GPU instances, the costs would probably be too high.

[chanced]

I honestly don't know. My guess would be no, for two reasons.

GPU vs. CPU; GPUs are much better at the number crunching needed in producing the hashes ("mining"). I doubt very seriously that you can get the kind horsepower out of a vm. I could be wrong; they may have machines dedicated to scientific numeric calcs but then you would likely need to produce a driver for harnessing it, if it even exists.

Computational pricing would likely dwarf any kind of return. Electricity costs alone can be enough to offset profits. I can only imagine what adding AWS fees on top of it would do too.