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This is becoming a trend. SourceHut has banned cryptocurrency-related software from its platform. While I'm a vocal opponent of cryptocurrency and related technologies, I'm a little bit torn on this particular issue - it's a soft form of censorship.

The cryptocurrency market is currently already collapsing under its own weight. I don't think the idea should be attacked directly though (ideas are bulletproof), rather we should assess the side effects and ensure any harm is repaired. So if there was an opportunity to take direct action, it should have been at a regulatory level: carbon tax on the electricity, treat and regulate exchanges the same way you'd treat "brick&mortar" banks/exchanges/transfer services, tax mined coins as income, etc. GPU OEMs should've limited availability per buyer (no normal person needs more than 2 high-end gaming GPUs if they're actually just gaming). Even if you're a cloud provider, you should just charge extra for any excess wear on the hardware, maybe co-locate the "hot" nodes together, and leave politics at the door.

So on one hand, this is a form of censorship. I can imagine that given a sufficiently broad definition of a blockchain, you could use it to shut down any distributed, log-structured database project. On the other hand, the service provider also has the full right to refuse service to anyone, no explanation necessary - I'm certainly happy my company did so, whenever approached by any cryptobros.

It isn't censorship, it's freedom of association. Any business is free to decide who it does business with, offering trade and services requires consent from two parties, economic transactions are voluntary. Last time I checked sort of a leading principle of the whole cryptocurrency community.

That's not true, a business can't discriminate on race, gender, etc. But crypto ownership is ok. We draw the line at race and gender, but it's not a free for all

Protected class is a meaningless distinction in this context. Hetzner is not checking your tax records to determine if you are a cryptoholder, they are denying a specific transaction based on its nature, not yours.

Well, this may change after the wedding website Supreme Court case that is currently under consideration. The Supreme Court is weighing freedom of speech vs discrimination protection.

It may soon be legal to not allow certain races to be your client.

How is having lease terms for my private property in exchange for monthly consideration censorship ?

I am not being antagonistic. I am quite serious.

I myself have built out my own private on premise data center and have no contractual restrictions on what I can do. I’m only limited by US law.

It was expensive . I did it because I didn’t want to be restricted by Ovh etc lease terms .

It’s the same as owning your house vs renting.

> They have extremely impressive prices, but I've always been hesitant to use them for anything important because they've historically been known for very aggressively shutting down your service if their automated systems detect e.g. suspicious traffic.

I came here to say the same thing. I've had production servers shut down by Hetzner with zero warning. And I believe they also kept the hardware running and continued charging you for it...just without network. As a result of this experience, I now consider Hetzner unusable for production systems.

Any interactions with the support?

>I've always been hesitant to use them for anything important because they've historically been known for very aggressively shutting down your service if their automated systems detect e.g. suspicious traffic.

FWIW, I've been running a seedbox in Hetzner's Falkenstein datacenter for yrears without issue. I only use private trackers + 1 public tracker focused on asian content, but they're definitely capable of figuring out that the my traffic is mostly torrent-related and have never taken action. The only time they've ever null-routed me was when I accidentally left a DNS resolver open to the world.

Have a couple seedboxes for myself and friends. Sometimes public torrents are used, some of which are monitored. Hetzner just sends a notice about the report and gives you 24 hours to reply without disabling the server. If you miss it then they null route the offending server. Never had any issues with them denying my responses, they're usually very quick to respond to clear the abuse report after submitting.

Seriously love Hetzner, amazing prices and really fast human support.

What do you say in your reply? I'm assuming the evidence against you is simple and clear, so I'm surprised they clear the report.

The concern with cryptocurrency-related services is probably more around scamming and illegal business operations than mining as -- as you say -- mining should be relatively easy to detect.

I'd say if you want to run gray area services like crypto, porn or gambling, you should probably ensure in advance that the provider is okay with you running your service, not just that they don't explicitly list your use case in their ToS.

A few years back, I used a hosting company that was pretty lenient with the stuff they allowed. It was used by a lot of gray area or slightly shady websites. I didn't really care about that, but they suffered frequent outages because some of the shady sites were constantly being attacked. So I switched to a different hosting company that was stricter and did not constantly suffer from outages.

While researching EU alternatives to Stripe I ran into a payment processor that advertised itself as being a great fit for recurring subscriptions with plenty of payment options and good rates but the website looked like it was designed a decade ago. After googling the company I realized it's primarily used in the adult industry. Nothing against them but not the kind of associations most companies want when people google the name on their credit card charges to figure out what they are.

The problem with building a platform that distinguishes itself by not having specific rules is that it attracts primarily people looking to do things that would break those rules and that this creates an environment that can drive away anyone else. This is as true for business services as for anything else.

I'd say that crypto is not exactly gray area. But I am biased.

I would totally understand this on VPS and dedis where the crypto is mining ssd blocks (I think it’s name is Chia).

But preventing me from running a normal bitcoin node on my server, which writes 400GB once and is done makes me left confused.

Providing services to the crypto community probably makes you a huge target for cyber attacks and all kinds of fraud. It's the reason I would never get into that business, so I kind of understand why a company would prefer not to allow anything crypto related on their platform.

While surprisingly banning a class of services that few others ban is a problem in itself, what's a bigger problem is that a) the ToS doesn't mention it b) it's enforced without warning.

If these are not toy projects, outages can get expensive (due to networks imposing penalties on nodes that don't fulfill promises, or trading getting messed up).

> Providing services to the crypto community probably makes you a huge target for cyber attacks and all kinds of fraud

What will they do when a new form of fraud or a more potent way to do cyberattacks targets another online activity? Like ecommerce? Or blogs? Shut down all ecommerce sites? All blogs?

I find such measures as foolish as blocking port 25 - it works until the attackers and the software they use update itself to abuse the same thing in another way. A temporary relief that just complicates things.

> never get into that business

Shows why you somehow think running a node makes it a target for cyber attack and frauds...

How does running a node make it a target for such? They only relay publicly available information and targeting a single node doesn't really harm the network.

> I've always been hesitant to use them for anything important because they've historically been known for very aggressively shutting down your service if their automated systems detect e.g. suspicious traffic.

Yep, that's the fault of Hetzner that prevents them from being used by many startups instead of AWS, Azure GCP etc. AWS is very tolerant of what is being done on its network, for example. Whereas a startup that uses Hetzner services will have to make sure that their use case is not prohibited by Hetzner. Moreover, they would have to be vigilant to keep following the changes to Hetzner ToS and practices to avoid getting disconnected out of the blue one morning. With restrictive German laws and increasing Eu regulations, that is a major liability for any startup.

It would be great if Hetzner had a full fledged US subsidiary that was subject to US laws - one that didnt have to get burdened by German law.

I ran a very busy Tor node (not exit) that was also doing folding at home on the side on their cloud for years. Never have they complained or threatened to shut anything down. I have only good things to say about them