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 charts coinbase/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.bitcoin wmz exchange

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:The smaller USB miners are great for learning how to mine bitcoin, I am running a dozen Bitmain Antminer U2 miners myself.bitcoin price decreaseYou won't mine a lot of bitcoin though.bitcoin input scriptThe next step up would be a few hundred dollars for units like the Bitmain Antminer S5.ethereal audio labsFor a list of manufacturers and products, try Dogiecoin - Setup Guides.ethereum future timelineYou can find mining equipment used on Ebay and craigslist, as well as from various resellers or direct from the manufacturers.ethereum dark

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