Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

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Hetzner is great, I run services for my clients and production apps on their dedicated servers which are cheaper and more performant than AWS-wannabes like Linode and Digital Ocean which I used to use.

BUT I just wish they'd stop with the crypto fear. You can be banned just for having any form of crypto software running (i.e. a Bitcoin core node) or any form of cryptocurrency data in any shape or form.

Quote from a Reddit user quoting Hetzner's support: "From support: Please note that the operating of applications that are used to mine crypto currencies is not allowed on our dedicated and cloud servers. Our policy does not allow to run any application in connection with cryptocurrency. This includes mining/farming, plotting, operation of nodes, storage of blockchain data and trading."

That's far too vague to be sensible. I wanted to write some software to play with the Forth-like VM that's embedded in Bitcoin, and that sounds like it's forbidden (storing of blockchain data). I don't want to risk my livelihood or clients' VPSes to find out.

These draconian T&C rules is why I am slowly moving to the other AWS-wannabe-but-cheaper OVH, that at least has more sane and business-friendly terms and conditions, rather than being subject to the whims of some German middle manager that decided they just hate anything vaguely related to cryptocurrencies.

Energy is an input cost in running a server, and Hetzner talks in this very article about how they can keep prices low because they are obsessed with minimizing energy utilization. So it makes some sense that they would ban crypto mining: permitting it would significantly increase overall energy utilization and could quickly make their business model unprofitable.

Also, servicing legal requests related to crypto operations exhausts resources, and they probably don’t want to waste time, money, and people on those either.

Parent comment doesn't want to mine, but just operate a node (e.g. for validating incoming tx, which has nothing to do with mining).

Parent comment isn't complaining about a mining ban, but that they ban even just storing blockchain data, virtually no CPU cycles involved.

Yes, that's why I wrote the second paragraph. Running nodes related to other aspects of crypto can attract law enforcement requests. Same reason a lot of hosting providers don't permit running Tor/VPN gateways, BitTorrent servers, etc.

> So it makes some sense that they would ban crypto mining: permitting it would significantly increase overall energy utilization and could quickly make their business model unprofitable.

Then adding an energy usage limit would make more sense instead of a broad-usage ban, and it is significantly less invasive to examine a server’s energy expenditure rather than the server’s productive use.

Also, how do they investigate and enforce this ban? If it is possible to get banned for ‘trading,’ does this mean they are inspecting all communication and activity on instances they host?

Adding energy usage limits is much more complicated than you make it sound. And it would impact many more use-cases than cryptocurrency. It's much easier to ban crypto-usage and lose a hand full of customers, than implementing limitations that will impact everyone, which might cause them losing many, many customers.

So now they have to add individual energy usage monitoring so a minority of individuals mine/trade bitcoin?

The environmental ethics behind proof-of-work crypto is dubious at best. Maybe they’ve made a choice not to support crypto operations for ethical reasons.

this also doesn’t take into account the possibility that they’d have to increase their overall electrical capacity (amps), load distribution equipment, UPS, and generators. at cost to all other users, less runtime, more distributed cost, etc…

What does that have to do with them forbidding plotting or simply storing crypto data? How is that energy intensive?

you could always keep hertzner for work and use the others for experiments. although plotting being banned seems a bit extreme.

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