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Digital Ocean was just obliterating legitimate businesses when their GPU or CPU usage appeared to look like crypto mining. Since they only accept credit, this

Digital Ocean was just obliterating legitimate businesses when their GPU or CPU usage appeared to look like crypto mining. Since they only accept credit, this is exposing Digital Ocean to the risk of handing out cash-equivalents for potentially bad credit. This "forces" them to be aggressive against abuse. Unfortunately, heuristics aren't perfect, so they also occasionally execute a hapless business by accident. John C made the same comment that I did. Other than outright crime (child porn, etc...), there ought not be any limits on instance usage in clouds, provided that customers pay cash. Heck, let them crypto mine if they wish, as long as they pay cash! Who cares? It's just computation.

fragmede 4y ago
Because smart money was on the GPU market eventually coming back down to Earth due to a crash in the crypto market. Which it mostly has. What no one could reasonably predict is when (market can stay irrational and all that). Cloud providers buy obscene amounts of hardware for obscene amounts of money, and if their capacity predictions are off, they lose tons of money. Disallowing crypto mining on GPUs then just makes sense. You just never know when those customers are going to evaporate leaving you high and dry with a GPU farm that people aren't paying for.
- brunoTbear 4y ago
  Cash doesn't really exist in the payments stack for an online business. Credit card chargebacks can roll in months after a compute instance is closed down and companies like Google have little recourse here. "Just take cash" isn't an option.
  - paranoidrobot 4y ago
    I know AWS does, or did, take wire transfers for payment. Those are much harder to claw back, particularly if you have a signed agreement from the customer saying "We want to pre-pay for $50k in compute resources. We understand that once the pre-paid amount is used, it cannot be refunded." I'm sure GCP and any other legitimate cloud provider could also take wire transfers for sizable payments, without issue.
- drexlspivey 4y ago
  > Because smart money was on the GPU market eventually coming back down to Earth due to a crash in the crypto market. Which it mostly has. What no one could reasonably predict is when (market can stay irrational and all that) GPU prices didn't come down because crypto crashed, they came down because ETH switched to proof of stake making mining on GPUs obsolete. Anyone could predict when this would happen because it was pre announced.
  - telotortium 4y ago
    Except for when Ethereum kept on delaying the merge (it was initially supposed to happen sometime around 2018)...
  - impulser_ 4y ago
    Yeah, because they definitely didn't delay it multiple times.

fragmede 4y ago

Because smart money was on the GPU market eventually coming back down to Earth due to a crash in the crypto market. Which it mostly has. What no one could reasonably predict is when (market can stay irrational and all that). Cloud providers buy obscene amounts of hardware for obscene amounts of money, and if their capacity predictions are off, they lose tons of money. Disallowing crypto mining on GPUs then just makes sense. You just never know when those customers are going to evaporate leaving you high and dry with a GPU farm that people aren't paying for.

brunoTbear 4y ago
Cash doesn't really exist in the payments stack for an online business. Credit card chargebacks can roll in months after a compute instance is closed down and companies like Google have little recourse here. "Just take cash" isn't an option.
- paranoidrobot 4y ago
  I know AWS does, or did, take wire transfers for payment. Those are much harder to claw back, particularly if you have a signed agreement from the customer saying "We want to pre-pay for $50k in compute resources. We understand that once the pre-paid amount is used, it cannot be refunded." I'm sure GCP and any other legitimate cloud provider could also take wire transfers for sizable payments, without issue.
drexlspivey 4y ago
> Because smart money was on the GPU market eventually coming back down to Earth due to a crash in the crypto market. Which it mostly has. What no one could reasonably predict is when (market can stay irrational and all that) GPU prices didn't come down because crypto crashed, they came down because ETH switched to proof of stake making mining on GPUs obsolete. Anyone could predict when this would happen because it was pre announced.
- telotortium 4y ago
  Except for when Ethereum kept on delaying the merge (it was initially supposed to happen sometime around 2018)...
- impulser_ 4y ago
  Yeah, because they definitely didn't delay it multiple times.