You posted multiple flamewar comments in this thread. Can you please not do that? We're trying for something different here, and you can make your substantive points without it.
Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27212899 are particularly bad. Please don't do that on HN—it destroys this place for its intended purpose, which is simply to have an interesting forum on the internet that hopefully doesn't suck.
It costs them more to serve these resources to you. They're not obligated to deal with customers whose use of the resources goes beyond the ordinary or regular.
It's their business and they can do what they want. Why is it hard for you to understand that your opinion is not authoritative? You can hate their business just as much as they can hate your patronage.
I guess being anti-crypto is virtue signaling now. Guess that means we're at the turning point where crypto isn't this cool magic money thing anymore now that the harsh light of day is being shone on the industry.
Or, I think more likely, is that the parent can't actually form a cohesive argument and is part of a group of people for whom the term "virtue signaling" has become synonymous with "bad" but is used to try carry more intellectual weight than it actually does.
They have forbidden crypto mining on their cloud services (i.e. shared cpu hardware) since it started, but until recently they allowed it on dedicated servers. Stopping it now seems to be a result of Chia having a real impact on their equipment availability and longevity. Chia has apparently also driven up the street price of large HDD's by a significant amount, 30% according to a forum post I saw.
There are plenty of things that you cannot do in an apartment. If it's a building with multiple tenants, you'll be forbidden from doing stuff that's an unnecessary disturbance to other tenants. But even apart from that, there are physical limitations. For example, many apartment buildings forbid large aquariums because the building is not designed to handle the uneven load distribution.
Look, this argument basically just boils down to "businesses can't fire customers for whom it doesn't make financial, operational, or reputational sense to serve." And like sure that sounds good except that we currently take the opposite stance by having protected classes. They are the single carve-out exception for the general idea that you can otherwise fire your customers for any reason you see fit.
All compute classes have never been treated equally though. If I open an AWS account and launch dozens of instances and DDoS other customers / locations on the internet AWS will terminate my account and shut everything down. The provider always has discretion on whatever it really wants to provide service to you or not.
Folks need to wake up to the fact that if we all end up relying on 3 cloud providers, we also end up having to live with their discretion regarding what is acceptable / moral use.
Also, this isn’t really the same as a DDOS, this is localised computation effectively. Running a hash function.
> Tbf I wouldn’t like to think they’d even know what I’m doing. Privacy should be ok.
that would be my biggest concern. how are they deciding what i'm doing, and what happens when my usage pattern triggers their magical detection?
am i booted immediately? do i get a useful number of business days to say "nope, i'm actually doing something else entirely!" and they leave it at that? or do i have to somehow "prove" what computations i'm going to run before i do so?
it's well and good to let them have whatever ToS they want, and that's certainly the direction i lean in, but enforcement of some ToS can imply concerning things.
You do get abuse notices that you have to respond to before your server gets isolated from the Internet. If you don't, you can request unblocking later from support staff.
