This isn’t profitable; if you do this, stop after a while because you can get a better US Dollar to Bitcoin exchange rate basically anywhere else.

You might think it’s a good idea to learn how to use Amazon EC2 at some point, especially with their big juicy GPU Computing instances. Here’s how to use one to throw hard-earned US dollars away for fractional Bitcoins.

  1. Sign up for an EC2 account at https://aws.amazon.com/
  2. While waiting for your account to be activated, review http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/starcluster/2010-December/000572.html and copy the AMI name (“ami-12b6477b”).
  3. Once the account is activated, log in to the AWS Management Console.
  4. Bid on a Spot Instance, use a Reserved Instance, or start a regular Instance of the “cg1.4xlarge” flavor.
  5. Go through the setup steps and remember to save the ssh key.
  6. While you wait for the instance to start, copy the ssh key to your .ssh directory and chmod it 400 like the on-screen instructions say.
  7. Once the instance is running, ssh in:
    ssh -i .ssh/yourkey.pem root@ec2-12-34-56-78.compute-5.amazonaws.com
  8. Use git to clone the python opencl miner from https://github.com/Kiv/poclbm :
  9. git clone https://github.com/Kiv/poclbm.git
  10. Start two instances of the miner, in this case pointing at http://deepbit.net with username “cooldudeirl” and password “asdf”:
    python26 poclbm.py -d0 --host=deepbit.net --port=8332 --user=cooldudeirl --pass=asdf & python26 poclbm.py -d1  --host=deepbit.net --port=8332 --user=cooldudeirl --pass=asdf
  11. Profit This isn’t actually profitable.