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It seems likely their policies are a response to the risk that abusers will mine cryptocurrency, then skip out without paying the bill. Register multiple accoun
by xyzzy123 10y ago
It seems likely their policies are a response to the risk that abusers will mine cryptocurrency, then skip out without paying the bill. Register multiple accounts, repeat ad nauseum.
Even requiring a credit card isn't too helpful because cryptocurrency can be cashed out right away, while credit cards transactions can be reversed.
Also, for new accounts which have not been billed yet there is a lot of uncertainty about whether the account was really registered by the cardholder.
This is a nontrivial fraud problem, and the cloud provider response is a first approximation to a solution. I would expect that as they engineer better fraud signals and risk scoring, they'll eventually be able to offer gpus to new accounts.
- thatrascaltiger 10y agoExactly which cryptocurrency is actually feasible to GPU mine? Bitcoin hasn't been feasible to GPU mine for years.
- JorgeGT 10y agoNot feasible if you have to foot the bill. But if you don't...
- bduerst 10y agoYeah, this seems like a scam that would be easy to automate too, for just about any rewards-based mining cryptocurrency.
- xyzzy123 10y agoCheck out whattomine or coinwarz for a list. There are a number of currencies specifically designed to be gpu mineable, in an effort to be more "democratic".
- Taek 10y agoMany of them. Pretty much nothing sha based, and nothing Scrypt based, nothing stake based, but most everything else is fine. Ethereum, Monero, Zcash, Sia off the top of my head, I am pretty confident there are at least a few dozen others as well.
- jph00 10y agoThat's possible, although my understanding is it's more of a capacity planning issue. Indeed, new users can fire up a bunch of much more experience massively multi-core instances and rack up bigger bills than with the GPU instances. But whatever the reasoning is, the lack of communication of the issue to customers and support staff, and the pointless marketing of a product that new users can't access, is a recipe for frustration.
- Taek 10y agoFunny enough they could solve this problem with cryptocurrency. Small payments are irreversible after about 10 minutes, and 5 digit payments are irreversible after about an hour, at least when Bitcoin is the base.