What constitutes abuse? I imagine certain applications that would be fine with the server going up and down every 2 hours. That would effectively mean that they would have free service indefinitely. For example, a Tor bridge.
A tor bridge/relay might not be an issue but TOR exit nodes will almost certainly result in abuse complaints and action being taken.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7490766
Just google aws bitcoin mining abuse and see what happens when shitty people have access to free servers.
Why aren't people using AWS free tier to Bitcoin mine?
Seems a bad prop.
As far as the API goes, I don't know if you're aware of how hacking works, but not having an api has protected exactly no one ever. Calling your application secure because "it has a button, not an API" is completely absurd. [2]
As far as costs, you understand that people do thousands of tasks on mechanic turk for pennies right? 5 clicks to make a penny or two isn't out of the question, EVEN WITHOUT AUTOMATION, when the cost for living in some parts of the world is egregiously low. [3]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6818015
[2] http://www.seleniumhq.org/docs/01_introducing_selenium.jsp
[3] http://online-job-work.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/mechan...
You still have to invest either your time or hire someone to set things up for the mechanical turk setup - the opportunity cost you pointed out earlier. And pennies per turk isn't worth it if your ROI is micropennies per turk. Depending on how much friction there is, it may be cheaper to trick your turks into running the bitcoin miner on their own computers.
Not saying there's no potential for abuse - as you say, there is - but saying there's "no costs" and that "You literally can't lose" is about as accurate as saying there's "no profits" and that "You literally can't win". Unless CPU bitcoin mining is wildly more profitable than my understanding, given that you're competing against GPU and ASIC miners.
Maybe one of the alt-currencies that are supposedly harder to GPU mine...?
Or screen scraping. That's still a thing.
I understand hacking. I think this entire project is dead on arrival because it has no business value. He is offering to save me 2 cents at digital ocean and maybe profit if I pay 2x the DO price for a VM with less features. That is why this is a dead product.
Wringing your hands about being hacked to make $0.25 Bitcoin mining? That that is not the problem here.
Having the ability to add more time with Bitcoin or Alipay is also a plus for some people.