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Some friends and I currently run a webapp and we rent 50 dedicated servers that run a few dozen linux VMs each. During the night they are not used a lot so we thought we could use them for cpu mining litecoin. We know that thats normally not profitable but we rent the servers for a fixed price so we could at least make a little money back each month.
Each VM gets roughly 0.5 to 2 kh/s. We already tried some LTC mining pools however all the ones we have found had pretty high share difficulties (64 and higher), so we only rarely got confirmed shares because clean_jobs=True messages would come before a VM could finish a share.
We are now also considering setting up our own internal mining pool that connects to a bigger external pool and divides shares further for our VMs. We also considered using some other altcoin type thats more suitable for CPU mining, but that mostly seems more trouble than it's worth.
Whats the best way to utilize such a setup?
Thanks guys!
1On profitability, as long as you are not paying the electric bill, it might be worth it, but I wouldn't be surprised if after you do all this work you start thinking that the $ amount you make is less than minimum wage. But you can't put a price on experience ;) – 4276 – 2014-03-16T02:36:16.177
Just one $500 graphics card would outdo all the servers for 1/100th of the power usage and the time you'd personally put into this would be more expensive than a year of mining. – John T – 2014-03-16T04:20:52.410