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Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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?

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.

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