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> Pricing adjustment helps if there's a arbitrage on cost to run vs amount charged. There very well could be if mining uses more power and the increased power c

> Pricing adjustment helps if there's a arbitrage on cost to run vs amount charged. There very well could be if mining uses more power and the increased power cost is material. Ideally, the amount charged would be a sensible reflection of real-world costs, including power usage (perhaps with occasional concessions to provide some measure of pricing stability to customers). Otherwise, it’s no surprise that customers will take advantage of that arbitrage. > Pricing adjustment doesn't help if cryptocurrency mining is being used to generate income from VMs leased with stolen credit cards. Might be more useful to have a CPU limiter that eases up as the VM (or payment) ages; although if that's not public knowledge, it will lead to support requests. Then the problem is the use of stolen credit cards, not crypto mining. I could just as easily spin up a botnet, or scammy gambling/warez site, or a spammy email campaign, or a myriad of other things that could negatively impact the business’s finances or reputation. The right way to address this issue is to improve the KYC process so that such cards cannot be so easily used in the first place.

toast0 4y ago
> Then the problem is the use of stolen credit cards, not crypto mining. I could just as easily spin up a botnet, or scammy gambling/warez site, or a spammy email campaign, or a myriad of other things that could negatively impact the business’s finances or reputation. The right way to address this issue is to improve the KYC process so that such cards cannot be so easily used in the first place. Improved KYC process is easier to say than to do without chasing off customers. I'm not going to participate in much in the way of KYC in order to get a $7/month VM. If they want to see my government issued identification, I'll find someone else to sell me a VM, it's a crowded field (and I'll be leaving anyway, since they are dropping support for my preferred OS; once I decide on which of the many others to move to) Spammy email is usually solved by restricting port 25 access. It's amazingly common to have that port blocked for new accounts in hosting. Botnet or scam sites don't really have a major cost for the hosting company; maybe you have to field a couple abuse reports, but nobody is going to blacklist your IPs for that, and they don't tend to use a lot of power or bandwidth, so it's not a big cost.

toast0 4y ago

> Then the problem is the use of stolen credit cards, not crypto mining. I could just as easily spin up a botnet, or scammy gambling/warez site, or a spammy email campaign, or a myriad of other things that could negatively impact the business’s finances or reputation. The right way to address this issue is to improve the KYC process so that such cards cannot be so easily used in the first place. Improved KYC process is easier to say than to do without chasing off customers. I'm not going to participate in much in the way of KYC in order to get a $7/month VM. If they want to see my government issued identification, I'll find someone else to sell me a VM, it's a crowded field (and I'll be leaving anyway, since they are dropping support for my preferred OS; once I decide on which of the many others to move to) Spammy email is usually solved by restricting port 25 access. It's amazingly common to have that port blocked for new accounts in hosting. Botnet or scam sites don't really have a major cost for the hosting company; maybe you have to field a couple abuse reports, but nobody is going to blacklist your IPs for that, and they don't tend to use a lot of power or bandwidth, so it's not a big cost.