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Mining cryptocurrencies is a good way to launder stolen credit cards numbers to cash. It is scalable (unlike most digital goods) and automatable (unlike most ph
by jsnell 6y ago
Mining cryptocurrencies is a good way to launder stolen credit cards numbers to cash. It is scalable (unlike most digital goods) and automatable (unlike most physical goods). It being unprofitable will not dissuade anyone from this use case: they are not paying with their own money to start with.
So it is best to forbid it in the TOS and just autokill the miners, rather than wait for the chargebacks. Especially if the compute is being sold at cost, since there is no buffer of profits to balance out the abuse.
- ilmoi 6y agoWow thanks for posting this! I defo haven't thought about this use case. So interesting. So we actually explicitly prohibit mining in the T&Cs, it's just that in the FAQ I wanted to be a bit more human and dissuade people. Also, there's quite a few protections built-in at the network layer to make sure mining isn't possible. Ports, ips, dns, even DPI. I learnt a lot about the early days of bitcoin and mining protocols when I was building gpu.land:) But again, thanks for sharing this. Really good to know.