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Perhaps not, but hasn't Amazon here basically lined up the incentives to make it the most logical thing for someone to do? A person in this scenario is receiving AWS credit they don't want, AWS won't offer a market for, so they're exchanging? arbitraging? it into some cryptocurrency. (And from there, probably to cash.)

Someone should make an AWSWS webservice where you can get paid to run others' instances on your account to monetize credits - would probably be a lot more efficient.

Would be interesting to see where the market prices these credits.

This is too b&w. Does a meat eater not care about the environment or the animals?

Mining crypto does not mean you do not care about the environment. Heck, we all live in 1st world cities that are giant wastes of energy, we spend massive amounts of energy traveling.

No it's not black and white. Some technologies have a strong environmental impact but they are usually very beneficial to the society. I can't say that about the proof of work of cryptomoneys.

I would imagine mining in a datacenter is more efficient than mining on a desktop.