Cryptonote mining on Google Cloud Preemptive VMs
I tested out and did a few calculations of how profitable it would be to mine Monero with minergate and Google clouds preemptive VMs.
Monero uses the Cryptonote hashing algorithm that still doesn't have a good ASIC designed for it so its still a viable way of making some spare money if you have any spare hardware lying around.
For these tests i created a preemptive VM with the lowest possible memory setting, 24 cores (the most i could get) based on ubuntu 17 with this startup script
minergate-cli -user [email protected] -fcn+xmr
wget https://minergate.com/download/deb-cli
sudo dpkg -i deb-cli
minergate-cli -user [email protected] -fcn+xmr
pricing of 24 cpus of preemptible vm in us-west
$137.61 per month
hashrate 600H/s
using the minergate calculator you get:
per day:
0.00036 worth of btc from mining xmr + fcn .00001 btc worth of fcn with merged mining
so with the price of bitcoin currently at ~4600
0.00037 * 4600 * 30 = $51 per month
So its roughly halfing the amount of money you own at $51/$137 = 0.37226277372 of losses.
Free credit?
Googles free $300 of credit could be converted into $300 * 0.37226277372 = $111.60 of Monero.
Google probably would let ~1000 or so of these preemptive VMs go under the radar so its very plausable hackers could easily extract 111k of funds by automatically creating fake accounts: https://www.wired.com/2014/07/how-hackers-hid-a-money-mining-botnet-in-amazons-cloud/
It only takes a few minutes to create an account and spin up a few of these VM's so hackers wouldn't even have to automate this, they could do it by hand in a few days.
To be clear on the legality of this, its against Googles terms and will almost certainly get you banned:
googles terms: "Some actions are prohibited during the free trial. For example, during your free trial you may not use Google Cloud Platform services to engage in mining cryptocurrency."
affiliate links to:
https://minergate.com/a/855fab75daa342f8830fc3ee
$10 of free btc when purchasing $100 of btc on coinbase https://www.coinbase.com/join/58857db981d9245c323751e9
BTC Donations: 19CE5PVwF9msZFNW3anA7aag6abbTzA94i