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Some friends and I currently run a webapp and we rent 50 dedicated servers that run a few dozen linux VMs each. During the night they are not used a lot so we thought we could use them for cpu mining litecoin. We know that thats normally not profitable but we rent the servers for a fixed price so we could at least make a little money back each month.

Each VM gets roughly 0.5 to 2 kh/s. We already tried some LTC mining pools however all the ones we have found had pretty high share difficulties (64 and higher), so we only rarely got confirmed shares because clean_jobs=True messages would come before a VM could finish a share.

We are now also considering setting up our own internal mining pool that connects to a bigger external pool and divides shares further for our VMs. We also considered using some other altcoin type thats more suitable for CPU mining, but that mostly seems more trouble than it's worth.

Whats the best way to utilize such a setup?

Thanks guys!

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    On profitability, as long as you are not paying the electric bill, it might be worth it, but I wouldn't be surprised if after you do all this work you start thinking that the $ amount you make is less than minimum wage. But you can't put a price on experience ;)
    – frеdsbend
    Mar 16, 2014 at 2:36
  • Just one $500 graphics card would outdo all the servers for 1/100th of the power usage and the time you'd personally put into this would be more expensive than a year of mining.
    – John T
    Mar 16, 2014 at 4:20

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Most likely it isn't worth the effort, even if you're not paying for electricity. But if you want to do it, CPU coins are the way to go. I'm not sure why you consider it "more trouble than it's worth." Check out the profitability calculators for Memorycoin and Primecoin to see if they're worth your time. If you don't want to hold those coins, you can sell them on an exchange for Bitcoin or Litecoin.

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  • Or Protoshares, Quarkcoin, or any of the other CPU-only crypto-coins out there. Indeed much more money could be made mining those and then selling for BTC/LTC than mining these using only CPU, not worth it.
    – Joe Pineda
    Mar 16, 2014 at 13:53
  • Would you mind adding these 2 sites in an answer to question bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/19198 , please? Should you know of other profitability calculators for Protoshares, Quarkcoin or any other CPU-only coin, that'd be extremely appreciated :)
    – Joe Pineda
    Mar 19, 2014 at 17:02

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