If you read recent articles about cryptocurrency mining you will find everywhere that it became very volatile. Mostly ASIC miners are dominating the mining scene and the prices keep dropping. With the low prices of cryptocurrencies and the still high cost of ASIC miners, everyone warns you not to invest in new mining hardware.
We knew that it is not profitable, but we investigated an alternative route to cryptocurrency mining, where you don't need to own your hardware in order to mine. How much can we earn a month? What needs to change in order for this to generate an income? Follow us through the journey to find out.
Disclaimer: Right at the beginning, we want to point out, that we are writing this article for demonstrating purposes. We do not encourage anyone to mine cryptocurrencies, and to mine at the places where we ran our tests. You can read the full post here.
DigitalOcean
We choose our first server at DigitalOcean and we picked their second CPU optimized droplet. This plan comes with two virtual cores, 4 GB of memory and 25 GB of SSD storage. These types of plans are equipped with faster processors, so are perfect for computing heavy workloads.
The plan is available for $40/month so it is not so expensive to try out if you are interested. The servers are loaded with Intel Xeon E5-2697A v4 (16 cores @ 2.60GHz), and each of this plan have 2 cores dedicated to them.
BYTECOIN
To mine Bytecoin we used MinerGate as a mining pool. They have their own software that is easy to use and easy to set up. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
At DigitalOcean we started mining Bytecoin on 11 23, 2018 at 13:17. The mining finished at 12 01, 2018 10:25. This means 7,028 mining minutes with an average hash rate of 90-95. We mined into a pool using MinerGate, and during our mining time, we mined 0.6525744 Bytecoins. If you do the math (calculating with a 30 day month) it comes out that we get around 4.01112 coins each month.
If we calculate with the same Bytecoin income from here and the same cost for renting the server, it will be profitable to mine if the price goes up to at least $9.971.
GRIDCOIN
There are currently two mining pools available for Gridcoin, GRCPool and Arikado Pool. We choose GRCPool for our test. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
Our second coin at DigitalOcean was Gridcoin. We mined using GRCpool, that is the support platform for BOINC. Our mining ran from 12 07, 2018 13:12 until 12 15, 2018 10:00. We got 11,328 minutes invested in mining with an average hash rate of 87, and we got up to 0.433 GRC each day. Calculating with these in mind we could expect approximately 25.98 Gridcoin each month.
If we calculate with the same Gridcoin income from here and the same cost for renting the server, it will be profitable to mine if the price goes up to at least $1.539.
ZCASH
To mine Zcash we used MinerGate as a mining pool. They have their own software that is easy to use and easy to set up. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
Our third coin is Zcash. We mined starting 12 01, 2018 10:29 and stopped at 12 07, 2018 08:50, so we spent 8,541 minutes mining. Our mining rate fluctuated between 5.4 and 7.2 Sol/S. During this time we mined 0 coins, which is not surprising since it is mainly mined with ASICs these days. We made over 51,000 good shares during our time when we mined, we would probably get a small amount if we would mine for a longer duration, but it can be easily seen that it will not be profitable in any way.
MONERO
For Monero, we choose Nanopool, with XMRig as our software. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
For our fourth cryptocurrency, we chose Monero. For Monero we mined from a Nanopool. Monero mining started on 12 15, 2018 11:55 and we finished on 12 19, 2018 09:12. With our 5,597 minutes spent mining and an average of 81.6 H/s, we received 0,0020436 coins. If we take 30 days as a month we could get 0,015773 coins each month.
With the same Monero income, it gets profitable if the price will rise to $2535.920.
UPLEXA
For mining uPlexa we choose PoolBUX as our pool, and we ran XMRig-UPX to actually mine our coins. For the complete guide and setup steps check out our post.
Our final coin was the freshly started uPlexa. We used PoolBUX as our mining pool. We started on 12 19, 2018 09:50 and stopped on 12 21, 2018 09:27. This gives us 2,857 mining minutes, during which we achieved an average 601 H/s. In this time we received 1,258.25 coins, so that takes us about 19,025.69 coins each month.
We caught the early phase of a coin to mine, so you can not really expect the same rates, but if we get this many coins it will be profitable if the price is $0.0021.
Results
Let's look through the numbers real quick, to see how our servers did in mining different cryptocurrencies. We made our calculations with the price of the coins on 01 29, 2019. The calculated income is in USD.
The prices were the following: Bytecoin: $0.000589, Gridcoin: $0.004318, Zcash: $48.52, Monero: $43.30, uPlexa: $0.00021212.
As we can see on the first graph, we got a really different amount of coins from the same VPS. All of these numbers are calculated, this much would we earn if we mined for a whole month. Of course, the two big factors for the amount we get each month is the difficulty of the current cryptocurrency and the computing power that we spend mining.
The more interesting graph is the income that we can generate while mining these coins. While Monero had very little coin generated, but the higher price gets us the second biggest income. Surprisingly the most profitable (or least amount of loss produced) was the new coin: uPlexa.
This cannot be sustainable indefinitely, but if you mine promising new coins that later rise in price, you can make a nice profit out of it. Even the new coin uPlexa only generated about 1/10 of the price of the VPS.
Sadly either of the coins generated enough income to worth it. This is most likely due to the current low price of all cryptocurrencies and the ASIC mining, that took over almost every altcoin.
Conclusion
We can clearly see that mining on these kind of servers is not profitable at all. We got the best results on a very new coin, but obviously, that is not sustainable long term. It is obvious that at the moment all cryptocurrencies are at a very low price. This could change in the future, but we can't predict anything for certain.
For more the more detailed article with more servers tested on, check out our original post on VPSServer.Shop.