Someone mine with supercomputer
Someone mines with GPUs and someone else mines with Amazon ec2.
How can you tell if the increase in the hashrate is because of ec2 or GPU mining?
Price is one hint. The EC2 spot market costs about $0.27 per hour for a big compute machine, plus some data transfer charges, etc., etc. Let's call it $0.30 total. That machine gets about 1.2mhash/s. (Probably 1.3, but I'm conservative).
An EC2 miner will launch when:
hash/s one day reward cost/day
(1200000 * 86400 / diff) * 17 * price * BTC/USD > (24*0.3) (this is about $7.50/day)
Last night, diff was 90B, price was 0.001:
1200000*86400/90000000000 * 17 * .001 * 630
12.33792000000000000000
It was EC2. A cloud miner was making $12 for every $7.50 s/he spent.
This morning, price is down to .0008 and diff is back up to 115:
1200000*86400/114000000000 * 17 * .0008 * 630
7.79237052631578947070
(which is just about at the breakeven point). That means we'll start to see the instances be killed and the diff drop off slowly.
I bet if you do the analysis, you'll observe that the difficulty of mining BBR over the last few weeks has almost exactly matched the cost to mine it at 1.3mh/s on AWS at $0.27/hour. This is the most easily available, scalable source of CPU for miners.
The bright side is that this means the coin is still extremely profitable for home miners once we can get the pools running as efficiently as solo. It's very rare for a coin to be so profitable as to be mineable on EC2. My i7-4770 is getting $2/day of BBR. Before the cryptonote coins came around, it was getting less than $0.50 per day mining Riecoin.
Great Volume!!!
