[dgacmu]

The spot market prices have been going up non-stop. I finally pulled the plug today when my expected daily revenue was down to about $5. (There's some risk inherent in doing this, because a market crash could leave you saddled with a day of Amazon bills with nothing to show for it. So it becomes less attractive at low margins.)

I was only able to run 60 nodes for the first two days. After that, spot market prices in CA and Oregon went too high for profitability.

At this point, the spot market has gone insane. Mining with my code isn't profitable over about $0.130/hour with the current exchange rates, and the market is at, um, $6/hour in some places. I hypothesize that people are typo'ing in their EC2 spot bids and typing $6 when they mean $0.6, because otherwise it's completely irrational: You can get a normal instance for $0.65/hour. Not that people are rational, but...

It also requires some care and feeding. The $17k isn't really free passive income. The pools go awry, the exchanges go awry, ... At larger scale, you could amortize all of that management time and automate the majority of it, but at a few bucks here and there it's simply not worth it.