Ok, how on earth do I get Ethereum? It seems to be a difficult thing in my country, I can get BitCoin through luno but transfer it to an exchange and then trade for Ether seems to be stupid expensive for the amounts I want. Mining at home is not an option; not on my 2011 struggling iMac, so that leaves the great big cloud.
Fortunately there are a few tutorials out there with a step by step guide to mine Ether on AWS, the one that worked for me was Ethereum mining on AWS in 5mins.
The mining was ridiculously slow, and unless the Ether/USD rate shot through the roof and the Rand strengthened significantly, I was always going to be paying through my teeth.
Somethings I learned in this process:
1. When setting up the Security groups for access into the instance remember to set to your IP aaaaaaaand remember to make sure that if your IP address changes you do this again.
2. Use screen or a similar method when running the ethminer so that it continues to run even when the connection is lost to the ssh session or you close it down.
3. If you need to authorize anything on the pool like changing the payment threshold then you can get the ip address of your worker by performing a nslookup on the domain name you ssh’ed into.
Conclusion
Over the 3 days (the first 2 were a bit up and down) I mined ~ 0.006 ETH = ~ 1.8 USD = ~ 24.5 ZAR
The use of the AWS instance was 7.19 USD with a forecast of 219.53 USD if I ran it over the whole October
I would have be happy if I just broke even after paying the transfer fees, but alas.
[Image Credit: Ethereum]
