Skip to content /2016/01/30/analysing-my-progress-and-profitability-in-cryptocurrency-mining/ Note: This is extrememly inefficient and will not earn any bitcoin.You will just burn through Azure credits.Purchasing a $30 USB device is ~100000x faster.TL;DR The commands to create a machine in Azure to CPU mine are at the bottom.I have been playing with the blockchain lately, most notably the programmable blockchain Ethereum.I was interested in seeing how difficult it was to set up a machine to mine Bitcoin.What I discovered through my research was that it is possible, but pointless to do CPU mining in the cloud.Why is mining on Azure bad?While it is easy to set it up, CPU mining is extremely inefficient.Mining on CPUs was depreceated a long time ago when it was discovered that it was faster to do on GPUs.But now even GPUs have been deprecated in favor of power efficient ASIC machines /bitcoin-mining-hardware/ There are even cheap USB devices that you can plug in that give you GIGAhashes/second How did my Azure miner go?

My 2 core Azure machine costs $85/month, and doing CPU only getting me 4.24+4.25= 8.5 kilohash/second (0.0000085 GH/s), compare that to the 3.6 GH/s that an ASIC $30 USB device provides.And after 2 days of mining I didn’t even get a single hash even accepted by the mining pool, effictivelly making my mining worth 0%.Could this be faster?On Azure, renting servers with a faster CPU (D & G-Series) would net negligble increases due to CPU mining.The upcoming N-Series of VMs will have dedicated GPUs attached that you can offload work to.This would be an order of magnitude faster in mining./2015/09/29/microsoft-puts-gpu-boosters-on-azure-cloud/ The price per hour of a N-Series VM would be so high that you would be better off just paying to rent dedicated ASIC bitcoin mining rigs e.g./best-bitcoin-cloud-mining-contract-reviews/ Instructions for creating on Azure (if you really want to try it) Sign up for a mining pool e.g./ (to give you a higher chance of getting a trickle) create a new Ubuntu virtual machine from the marketplace.

I recommend Ubuntu on a basic size VM as we won’t be using the features of standard use Putty to remotely connect to your VM Install bitcoind (bitcoin daemon) sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bitcoin/bitcoin sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install bitcoin-qt Configure bitcoind Run bitcoind to see instructions on what should be in the bitcoin.conf Create a bitcoin.conf file under ~/.bitcoin sudo nano ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf Install a miner (cpuminer).bitcoin 2200/index.php?topic=55038.0 sudo apt-get install build-essential libcurl4-openssl-dev wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/cpuminer/files/pooler-cpuminer-2.4.2.tar.gz tar xzf pooler-cpuminer-*.tar.gz cd cpuminer-* ./configure CFLAGS=”-O3″ make start the miner to test it all works ./:3333 –u -p X add the miner to startup.ethereum public address

Edit /etc/rc.local to add it sudo nano /etc/rc.local Then on a line before exit 0, add the full path of your startup command with & at the end of the line e.g./:3333 –u -p X & Like this:On the 1st of December 2016, Microsoft released their new Nvidia-powered Virtual Machines(VMs) to the general public.They came with two options of GPUs: NVIDIA Tesla K80 or the NVIDIA Tesla M60This sort of GPU is meant for scientific research and video encoding yet as I rushed to get my hands on one of the VMs, I was wondering what I would do with it and the idea struck me: ‘Bitcoin Mining!bitcoin exchange shut downYES!, I could make thousands of pounds with these amazing GPUs’, I foolishly thought as I deployed a Ubuntu 16.04 VM.I chose the NV-12 variant, which offered 2 M60 GPUs with 12 cores and 112GB of RAM.ethereum java library

But this came at a price; £1,275.37 to be exact.Obviously, I could not afford this and my dreams began to fade as I opened the calculator and calculated that the VM would cost £1.77 per hour.I still had hope that perhaps I could mine more than this in an hour.I started up PUTTY and connected to the machine.I typed in my password and set to work:I made it easier than last time to do it as I compiled all the commands required into a simple script.bitcoin loopholeSimply:This will install all the required drivers and then generate a wallet address.bitcoin federal reserve paperOnce that has been completed all you need to do is start mining (Yes, it’s that simple).pi 2 bitcoin minerTo mine you will need a pool (I recommend using Minergate).bitcoin zoeken

Once you have signed up, run this command and replace ‘YOUREMAIL’ with your email:Once the miner has been compiled and installed, it is time to start mining.I decided to mine Litecoin(LTC) on this occasion.You will need a mining pool .For this example, I used Minergate.:3336 -u YOUR_EMAIL -p xPaste that command into the terminal and your off!Unfortunately, my dreams of making thousands were dashed as the terminal printed out the speed of mining.I had gone from £1000s to pennies.sell bitcoin to western unionThank you for reading and have a good day.You probably have heard of Bitcoin by now, some say this will be the future our financial transactions.We will see if that’s true or not in years to come.That said, Bitcoin might be hard to grasp on at first, it’s a form of crypto-currency that acts as a currency only live digitally on the internet.This isn’t a guide on understanding what Bitcoin is, but rather a step-by-step guide on how to spin off a virtual machine on your own to start mining Bitcoins.

The setup only works for mining on a shared pool, and is what most people out there are doing those days.If you ever hoping to mine some Bitcoins shared pool is your best bet.For a standard desktop CPU to mine a single Bitcoin, according to the calculation some did, it would need 100 years to mine one single Bitcoin.First go login to Microsoft Azure, they offer free trail if you don’t have a paid plan.We will be using Ubuntu as the base image to run this program called cpuminer.Click “All Resources” > Type “Ubuntu” Pick Ubuntu Server 15.04 or 14.04 both are ok.Click Create, this will proceed and you will need to give a hostname, user name and password.Remember the user name and password as that’s your root user to use to SSH login to the server.Use a tool such as Putty to SSH into the server with the credential and IP from above.Run the command below.First two command make sure your Ubuntu system are up to date.Next, it will grab all the dependencies that cpuminer requires in order to compile and run.