You also don't need to sing in the shower. You can leave the shower earlier, hire a TaskRabbit to sing for you instead, and if you value your time correctly you should come out ahead.
Well, if he just leaves this running, assuming the same level of profitability it is 17k a year of passive income...definitely worth keeping up if possible. as the exchange rate goes up it should become even more profitable.
The spot market prices have been going up non-stop. I finally pulled the plug today when my expected daily revenue was down to about $5. (There's some risk inherent in doing this, because a market crash could leave you saddled with a day of Amazon bills with nothing to show for it. So it becomes less attractive at low margins.)
I was only able to run 60 nodes for the first two days. After that, spot market prices in CA and Oregon went too high for profitability.
At this point, the spot market has gone insane. Mining with my code isn't profitable over about $0.130/hour with the current exchange rates, and the market is at, um, $6/hour in some places. I hypothesize that people are typo'ing in their EC2 spot bids and typing $6 when they mean $0.6, because otherwise it's completely irrational: You can get a normal instance for $0.65/hour. Not that people are rational, but...
It also requires some care and feeding. The $17k isn't really free passive income. The pools go awry, the exchanges go awry, ... At larger scale, you could amortize all of that management time and automate the majority of it, but at a few bucks here and there it's simply not worth it.
The problem is with cryptocoins, the window of opportunity is always small, short, and never comes again- you have to find an entirely new window.
Much like with most forms of arbitrage, and exploitable patterns in the stock market. You discovery the opportunity, you make a little $$, and the hole quickly closes as everyone else capitalizes on it too.
I don't think it would, actually. Enough people are willing to mine for a loss and the difficulty rises with availability of cheap hardware that it never becomes profitable. OP only made a (slight) profit because they could temporarily make renting a miner cheaper than the payout. This was temporary and now the market is back to status quo.
Maybe OP could automatically run his miners when such situations arrive, but I think it's unlikely to net anything like $17k/yr.
Edit: sliverstorm described this way better than I could.
If we assume the most optimistic parameters: $75 * 1mo * 60 instances = $4500 in profit for 1.5 weeks of work, or a rate of ~$156k/yr.
Edit: It looks like I misread his revenue numbers for profit. Oops! Even lower margins:
"My gross revenue was about $1000, and I paid Amazon $500 of that."
$500 for 1.5 weeks' work is only $17k/yr rate. Maybe flipping burgers pays better.