Black Hat Developer

Mining Monero on AWS machines

Mining Monero on AWS machines

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Black Hat Developer
Mar 16, 2023·

2 min read

I wanted to check: how efficient is it to mine Monero cryptocurrency in 2023?

  • Why Monero? Because it is CPU optimized and I like the fact that it is very secure. A lot of Darknet moved to Monero these days.

Execution

I bought a virtual machine on AWS. It is against their policy. They can ban your account for mining cryptocurrency on your account. Why? many reasons, but they do not like the fact that you use 100% resources that you pay for. So read EULA before such experiments.

I bought an AWS t2.medium machine. It costs:

  • $0.0464 per hour

  • $1.1136 per day

  • $33.4080 per month

Mining Pool

I created a Monero wallet in some random mobile application.

I connected to mining pool minexmr.com. It was a random choice, just googled it.

On the server I run:

ssh -i EC2_standard_instances_access.pem ubuntu@3.248.201.89
wget https://downloads.getmonero.org/gui/linux64
wget https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig/releases/download/v6.12.1/xmrig-6.12.1-focal-x64.tar.gz
tar -xf xmrig-6.12.1-focal-x64.tar.gz

./xmrig -o pool.minexmr.com:4444 -u 45yNPEpo1B77frcwKz9K3bbV4BLJJpchKBRAwVza6S9WPU4kJnBzsVS1zSpLU5Brdf7g3GDVVBVCP144HhAHUf1S85Pe7g4 > output.log 2>&1 &

By this, I can see my hash rate on the page of a mining pool.

You can see that at the beginning AWS gave me some boost to the instance, so the hash rate was pretty high. Later it was around 250 hash/second.

Results

I use online calculators to estimate the result:

  • Monero mined per day: 0.00004334 XMR

  • Mining Revenue**:**

    • per day (1 Monero = $150): $0.01

    • per month: $0.30

  • Daily electricity costs (based on some online calculator): $1.08

Summary

By spending $33 on AWS you can earn $0.30, which means 1% of the spent money.

Mining on AWS computers also looks very unprofitable. I know that instances on AWS are expensive. But still mining on the owned machine look ridiculous.

Who and how mine Monero then?

In my opinion, Monero miners are people who do it on somebody-owned computers (so not spending money on hardware and electricity), like:

  • maybe administrators of big amount of computers, eg. in some big organisations,

  • maybe bot owners, eg. on gaming computers

Contact

Let me know in the comments, what you think about this topic!

You can also write a direct message to me:

Cryptocurrencymonerohacking