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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:

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 income when mining with 16 cores (app. yield: 700H/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:

nicehash.com mining address

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:

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:

Whenever the computers in your azure-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):


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

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

Important Notes:


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