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Comment by gigq | Hacker News Reader

Makes you wonder why the criminal didn't launch g2.2xlarge instances which would get 185 kH/s per instance. In fact for awhile there litecoin mining was profitable at spot prices.

http://www.completefusion.com/profitable-litecoin-mining-on-...

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My guess would be ignorance. I don't think the criminal behind this knows what he is doing.

A smarter criminal would have opted for g2.2xlarge instances as well as mining for a currently more profitable coin. Granted he'd need to be careful not to leave a trail, he could essentially trade these coins for LTC and still obtain more litecoins.

An even smarter criminal would have "mined" the Ripple give away using EC2, there are still people paying for those instances as we speak so surely they would be more profitable than litecoin mining (assuming you sell them right away).

https://www.computingforgood.org/

https://ripple.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=4382

Uh, nope. I "mined" Ripple through that little project for a couple of days (using the g2 instances) and got a couple of dollars worth of Ripple back for over $100 ec2 bill (460 hours of WCG runtime).

I'll boinc on my desktop for science and goodwill but will not waste any more time on Ripple's program or indeed on Ripple itself, as brilliant as the idea is. Ripple's founders are hanging on to their 60%+ outstanding Ripples so tightly that I suspect the project will never truly get off the ground.

As much as people criticize it, I think some variation of Bitcoin's seignorage mining is the only realistic way to bootstrap a successful virtual currency, at least at this point.

Premined strategies like Ripple chose certainly aren't the road to success.

I used it to mine dogecoin using those same instructions. I either had to use an older nvidia driver version or an older version of CUDAminer, though. So it wasn't that simple to set up once CUDAminer got the update that broke the newer NVidia software. This happened near the first of the month. http://doges.org/index.php?topic=43.0

Pardon my ignorance but why are you dogecoin mining?

My guess: the difficulty is low enough that it's profitable to mine dogecoin and flip it for Bitcoin or Litecoin. I know a lot of altcoin miners do this, and there are some pools (middlecoin) that are geared towards this.

I'm even more amazed that there is demand for dogecoin then. I see the value of LTC and others but what is the USP of dogecoin?

It was created as a joke altcoin, but some people actually desire it. Most likely to flip it, or just to say they own some.

The doge brand is the USP. Most LTC clones are already largely undifferentiated, so this is actually a strong contender given it's technically almost identical to the rest.

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