Microsoft Azure VM selection for optimized mining

Question

I've come across a decent amount of Microsoft Azure credit and want to use it to to mine cryptocurrency.

I am writing to ask:

1. which computer to run the VM on - Azure provides a number of machines (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/series/#a-series) optimized for various tasks - 'General Purpose Computing', 'Compute Optimized', 'Memory and Storage Optimized', 'GPU enabled', ect. Under each of these categories, customers much choose the number of cores and amount ram (see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?service=virtual-machines) to use.

   I would like to know which machine type will mine the most efficiently, and how important are the different characteristics of a machine? (the number of cores, the amount of RAM, GB on disk?)

2. Which currency to mine - Bitcoin? Litecoin? any other Alt-coin suggestions?

3. How much money can I expect to earn?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Regardless of the cryptocurrency you choose to mine, you should get the machine with the most GPUs and CPUs as you can get (GPUs are especially important). This is because most, if not all, of the hash functions used in altcoins can be and have been GPU accelerated, so GPUs will be able to mine them far faster than CPUs can. Having more CPUs allows you to get a little extra hash power from the CPU as it can still mine, just less efficiently and less quickly than GPUs.

As for what to mine, I cannot tell you. I can say that you should not mine Bitcoin as the difficulty is too high for GPU and CPU mining to ever be profitable. Bitcoin mining requires special machines called ASICs now in order to actually mine something non-negligible.

Answer 2

I recall reading somewhere that Microsoft has anti-mining heuristics in azure, and they will deactivate you. they sell vm time by assuming you are not utilizing 100% of the resources.