Seems fair enough - just like you can't take your rental car racing because it causes more risk + wear on components than day to day driving. These guys are wise to ban this activity if it causes more wear on their SSD drives and attracts more risky customers.
I don't think this meaningfully reduces the life of a CPU. It is more about sucking up shared resources and making the customer experience all around worse for everyone else not mining crypto.
This is also exactly analogous to why cryptocurrencies should be banned entirely. They are sucking up shared resources and making the things around them (e.g. electricity use, turning on of fossil fuel power plants, mucking up the GPU markets for productive or entertainment purposes) all around worse for everyone else not taking part.
> They are sucking up shared resources and making the things around them (e.g. electricity use, turning on of fossil fuel power plants, mucking up the GPU markets for productive or entertainment purposes) all around worse for everyone else not taking part.
that seems like an overly broad definition of "shared resources". With the exception for rentals with unmetered utilities, those are all billed by usage. Nobody says that driving a SUV is "sucking up shared resources (fuel)" simply because it uses more fuel to do the same thing as a sedan.
"SUVs are the second-biggest cause of the rise in global carbon dioxide emissions during the past decade. Only the power sector is a bigger contributor."
Billing by usage is a method by which shared resources are allocated. It isn't the only way, and it assumes that the economic value an individual derives from use of a shared resource is proportional to, or at the very least correlated with, the benefit that society gains from allocating the resource to that individual. For cryptocurrency validators (I refuse to use the term "mining" as it is entirely inaccurate), the benefit to the individual validator is anticorrelated with the benefit to society.
>Billing by usage is a method by which shared resources are allocated.
By this logic, is every resource a shared resource? Does the concept of ownership not exist anymore? Am I committing the heinous crime of "sucking up shared resources" if I buy a $2000 gaming PC and use it to browse HN rather than to game?
By this logic, yes, every resource is a shared resource. I think that's a reasonable way to view things in a world where resources are limited. The purpose of money is to allocate shared and limited resources.
Ownership is a useful heuristic, both for planning ahead and for describing resources that are currently held exclusively. I'm not really sure what your point is on that one.
Intended actions matter. If you buy an expensive PC with the intent of video gaming, but then find that your interests shift, I have no problem with that. On the other hand, if you buy an expensive PC for the purpose of conspicuous consumption, to show off that you have bought it, then I'd be tilting my head at you. If you buy an expensive PC for the purpose of running it 24/7 to contribute to a system that is used primarily for speculation and that has enabled the rise of ransomware, then I have a large problem with it.
It might be worth noting that Hetzner is known to use consumer hardware for some of their lower tier offerings and consumer SSDs usually have a relatively low TBW (Terabyte written) rating.
I do wonder how they'll monitor it though?