How to Turn Your Azure Free Credits into Cryptocurrency

The rate can be as high as 1:1, i.e. for every 1$ spent on azure you will get almost 1$ worth of cryptocurrency (depending on the current exchange-rates). This is possible because the newly introduced Azure-batch-service is dirt cheap!

Short summary:

• You'll need a azure-account with free-credit, e.g. from a MSDN-subscription
• Get a Nicehash.com-account
• Start mining with the Azure-Batch-Service using the scripts provided here

Setup Azure with Free Credit

Do you have a MSDN-subscription from you day job? Great! You must have already noticed that Microsoft keeps sending you emails asking you to open an azure-account with up to 150$ monthly credit. Follow the instructions in the mail to claim your free credits.

If you don't have a MSDN-subscription, you can at least use the one-time credit of 200$ you get just for opening the Azure-account. Depending on the current altcoin-exchange-rate and whether azure adds tax to you bill or not it might even be profitable to keep running your azure-account on your credit-card - but note that you'll be operating on a razor-thin margin!

Setup Nicehash.com account

On whattomine.com you can see the estimated daily profit when mining with 16 cores (app. yield: 960H/s) in the azure cloud  → look at the "Nicehash-CryptoNight"-entry. It might not sound like much at first, but once you set it up it's free money :-)

With Nicehash.com you are basically always mining the most profitable altcoin and you get paid in bitcoin (read their documentation to learn how it works internally). You can sign up for a free account at Nicehash.com/register. Log in to your Nicehash.com account and observe your Nicehash.com mining address, you'll need it later. It should look similar to the screenshot below:

Setup the Azure Batch-Service

After signing up for your azure-account you can click on the following link to create a new batch-account: https://portal.azure.com/#create/Microsoft.BatchAccount Fill the form with following information:

• Account name: Just a name for your batch-account
• Resource Group: Click 'Create New' and give it a name, e.g. 'myRecGroup'
• Leave the other options at the default-settings.
• Click on 'Create' at the bottom to create the batch-account

Once you get the notification that your batch-accout has been created (it will take a few seconds), go to your batch-account and create a new pool: select 'Pools' and then click 'Add'. Fill the form with the following information:

•     Section 'Pool Detail':
• Pool ID: Just a name for your pool
•     Section 'Operating System':
• Publisher: Canonical
• SKU: 16-04 LTS
•     Section 'Node Size':
•  Node pricing tier: 'Standard F16 (16 Cores, 32GB)'
•     Leave the other options at the default-settings.
•     Click on 'OK' at the bottom to create the pool.

Whenever the computers in your pool get started up, they will execute a custom script which will download the mining-executable and start mining. Enter your Nicehash.com mining address here and click on the button to generate your personalized startup-script (your mining-address is visible in the dashboard once you log in to Nicehash.com, it should look similar to 3FZd4cJi7E75haNcUM5ASx6x1k1DRWWjBZ):

Generate script!

This is your personalized script:

(Note that the scripts and the miner-executable are hosted on github.com  - you can check out the code yourself if you have any doubts about the function of the script)

Once the pool is created, go to 'Start task'. Fill the form with the following information:

• Command line: here you have to enter your personalized script from the textfield above
• User identity: 'Task Autouser, Admin'
• Leave the other options at the default.
•  Click on 'Save'

Now go back to 'Overview' and click on 'Scale'. Enter '1' in the field 'Low priority nodes', and click on 'Save'. Congratulations! The azure cloud is now mining bitcoin for you!

To stop your pool, go to the overview-page of the pool, select 'Scale' and enter '0' as the number of 'Low priority nodes'. Then click 'Save'. Note that by default your pool will automatically stop when your free credits are exhausted. You can simply restart your pool in the next month once your free credits have been refilled.

Some Notes on handling your pool:

• The Nicehash-servers use a very high difficulty-setting. This means:
• While your miner will be visible a few minutes after starting up the pool, it will show up with a hash-rate of 0. You have to let your pool run for one hour or so to get meaningful statistics on the Nicehash.com website.
• I do not recommend mining to Nicehash.com with nodes which have less than 16 cores. Otherwise the hashrate per node might get so low that Nicehash is banning individual nodes.
• Azure has a standard-limit of 20 low-priority-cores per region. If the quota in your azure-account is less than that, you can request an increase of this quota through the azure support. I recommend not asking for more than 20 cores. We are operating in some kind of gray area here, you don't want to cause a big stir... If you want to mine with more than 20 cores i recommend setting up more pools in other regions (the quota limits only the number of cores per region, nothings stops you from setting up more pools in other regions).

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