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Amazon Cryptocurrency Mining: A Full Proof Guide To Get You Started With EC2

When it comes to the investment world, cryptocurrencies are all the rage. If you are reading this article, you are probably less interested in the actual investment process behind crypto, and more interested in the idea of mining the cryptocurrencies.

But the problem is the infrastructure you need to do this is ridiculous.

The good news is that you don’t need to set up an evil lab of mechanical gear, fancy computers, and nifty headsets to farm up on your crypto coins. Not a lot of people realize that you can make use of the cloud and Amazon EC2 platforms to mine your favorite currencies. Whether it be BitCoin or Ethereum.

So, what do you need to get the ball rolling?

 

Your First Going To Need To Get Some Cloud Hosting For Yourself

So, the first thing you need is to get the platform sorted out that you will be working on. In this case, that is the Amazon Web Services platform. This cloud platform offers virtual machines, tons of fancy features, as well as tons of storage.

All of which is going to be incredibly important for your project.

To get your account created, you can follow this link. Just so you know, account verification can take up to 24-hours to get started. Which is great, that leaves you enough time to figure out everything else you will need to get started.

Account created? Great now let’s navigate to the EC2 console.

All you need to do to get to the EC2 console is click on the “EC2” label on the home page. This will take you to the next step, which is the EC2 dashboard. This dashboard is your bread and butter. It’s the control center for your VM and security.

 

Time To Secure Your EC2 Console For Best Practises

Even though AWS is known to be really secure, you still need to take active measures to ensure that you are getting the best out of the security system. Something that is incredibly important when you are farming crypto.

To do this, we need you to look at the left-side menu. You should notice a tab, “Network & Security”. All you got to do is click on the create security button. Now, there will be a popup, which looks something like this.

For now, don’t worry too much about the VPC. We can leave that at default. The big thing that we need to take care of is inbound security. Click on the “Add Rule” button. There are three important rules that we need to add. As you can see below.

Under the source drop downs, you want to select the category, “my IP”. This will populate your IP address. Once that is done, click create.

 

Time To Bring Ubuntu Into The Picture

One of the most important things to remember is that you need extremely powerful accelerated computing power to farm on the cloud. Generally, this is too expensive to invest to off the top.

But that’s where AWS and EC2 comes into the picture. Because they take care of the virtualizing for you. So, we need to pinpoint a couple of strong GPU’s to use for our operations. A nifty thing AWS allows is the bidding on various GPU instances.

On the left side of the screen, you will see, “Spot Request”. Click on this. Now you want to search for Amazon Machine Learning. This will give you the latest version of Ubuntu.

With Ubuntu set up, you can now choose an instance type (the family of GPU’s you can use). You will need to do a bit of searching and market research to get the best price. For something like this, the NVIDIA G2, G3, P2 family may be expensive but they would work wonders.

Luckily, you can also refer to the pricing charts Amazon has available to make sure that you get the best bang for your buck. Here is an example of how their pricing graph looks.

 

Time To Sort Out Your Storage

Finally, it’s time to figure out what kind of storage you are going to need. Obviously, this is completely dependant on what we are looking at. If you are going to go hard into mining blockchains and crypto – you will need to invest in a fair amount of storage to get started.

Once your storage is configured, there is only one thing left to do! Which is connecting your Ubuntu service and installing the relevant dependencies? Here is a guide on how to do that.

Once you have managed to install all of your plugins, downloaded BegMiner, and Installed Cuda 8.0. You’re finally ready to move onto the mining step. You want to create a CoinBase account to get started.

 

Join The Mining Marketplace

All you need to do now is create a wallet for your mined coins to go into. Sign up to a good mining pool such as Dwarfpool or Minergate, and you should be good to go!