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Bitcoin mining on AWS in 2023 — the complete guide
The last time I wrote about crypto mining on AWS we were still before “The Merge” — the (in)famous 2022 event when Ethereum switched from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake which spelled the end of ETH mining. The lucky people with free AWS accounts then switched to mining Ethereum Classic (ETC) or Ethereum POW (ETHW) but these were very unprofitable, yielding perhaps 10% or 20% max on a good day. And that’s not 20% profit, that’s getting $20 in crypto for $100 spent in AWS costs. Not a good deal.
Eventually it turned out that some other crypto coins became a little more profitable — Ravencoin (RVN) leading the pack, with Ergo (ERG) not far behind, followed by Ethereum Classic (ETC), Kaspa (KAS) and others. They still weren’t profitable to mine, but if you access to a discounted or free AWS account it may have worked.
For that reason I kept getting requests to update my AWS Ethereum Miner templates and add a support for RVN, ERG, KAS, ETC, etc.
TL;DR — here you go: AWS Crypto Miner
Now what about the Bitcoin (BTC) mining promised in the blog title? I’m glad you ask! Here’s the twist: Get paid in Bitcoin for altcoin mining. In short we can get our altcoins payouts converted to BTC and sent to our Bitcoin wallet rather then to the native RVN or ERG wallets.
Why would we do that? It’s simple — if I mined $1000 in Ravencoin a year ago and kept the RVN it would be worth $515 today. But if I got it paid out in BTC it would now be worth $1687. Similar story with ETC, ERG and pretty much any other altcoin.
Bitcoin typically performs way better than the altcoins in the long run, whether you like it or not. But then of course the choice is yours — BTC payouts are just an option, my template supports the native coins payouts as well.
AWS Crypto Mining How-To
We will need 2 things to start:
- Bitcoin wallet where we get the BTC address for the payouts. Best to use one of the non-custodial wallets that give you a full control over our funds. For example Guarda, or…
