I’ve been using Google Cloud Platform (GCP) lately for an application I’m building, and I realized yesterday that I only had 4 days left to spend my remaining $293 in free credit for use on GCP. By the way, Google gives you $300 to spend when you sign up for GCP, assuming the promo is still happening.

“Oh shit!” was my first thought, until I realized I should just use as much computing power as I could on Google Compute Engine (part of GCP) to mine crypto. So I spent a couple hours building a Monero + Burst mining image, fired up 152 vCPU’s to mine Monero, plus another 16 vCPU’s + 10 TB of storage to mine Burst, and boom I’m spending way more than I’m mining, but hey it’s free money. Click the beautiful illegible image below to see an actual legible screenshot of the miners at work.

This is absolutely NOT profitable to do in the real world where you’re paying for on-demand cloud computing resources, though there is a way to make it profitable, using an application I’m building right now. More to come on that… sometime around December 15 :)