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Comment by jankassens | Hacker News Reader

I'm a happy customer for their reasonable prices. If the prices require banning extreme cost outliers like crypto mining I'm okay with that.

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Great hopefully you never need a compute resource they consider an outlier.

Do you take the same attitude to a rented apartment? A hotel room? Build your own datacenter if you want to own it.

If I was told that I get 1300sq ft to live in, and then got in trouble or kicked out for using all of it, I'd be pretty pissed off.

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.

Interesting point.

I’m not looking for crypto to be protected.

I’m looking for all compute classes to be treated equally.

Overriding this, a company should absolutely have the right to offload a customer.

That said, don’t then market yourself as general purpose computing in the cloud.

If I pay for xCPU @ xHz with yRAM I don’t want to have you then tell me what I can do with it. Just charge me aptly for my use.

Tbf I wouldn’t like to think they’d even know what I’m doing. Privacy should be ok.

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.

It’s a fair point.

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.

We are talking mostly about Chia, which destroys hardware, unlike computational applications.

This whole chia thing is new to me but i have terabytes of unused space on usb connected disks to my pc. Sounds like I won’t meet criteria?

I don't fault a company for not wanting to waste compute cycles, that could otherwise be doing useful work, on crap like crypto mining.

To be clear I don’t mine crypto.

That said I think your view is short sighted.

“Crap” may turn out to be useful. Have you noticed the US debt ceiling?

> 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.

Mining is not general purpose.

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