[seligman99]

Where's the line? I rented a EC2 node to calculate a fractal. It involved running a 36 physical cores machine at 100% CPU for a few days.

I paid AWS for that, but I surely impacted the lifespan of that box compared to someone else that would use it for something more traditional. AWS seems happy to let people use EC2 for whatever they'll pay for, for the most part, but does this mean that Hetzner doesn't want me to calculate the next version of my fractal on their machines?

Or has Hetzner just decided they don't want Cryptocurrencies, and that's exactly the line?

[adfrral]

Scale. Crypto mining on rented hardware will scale itself up to infinite machines if you let them, while “real” hardware-taxing use-cases are niche.

Renting out hardware involves setting a price point that turns a healthy profit assuming some average hardware lifespan.

Crypto miners that rent hardware are leveraging arbitrage though, where the price of hardware rentals is just low enough that the crypto mining generates more money than the rental cost.

This means they will rent as many resources as Hetzner will let them and hammer them as long and hard as Hetzner will let them, because it’s pure profit. All the risks associated with buying hardware for crypto mining is dumped on Hetzner’s collective lap for a fee that’s too small to justify it.

Either Hetzner can raise prices to eliminate this arbitrage opportunity (at the expense of their normal/primary customer base and core business), bet big on crypto and pivot to being a crypto mining company and cut out these middle-men, or just ban crypto and go back to business as usual. If Hetzner has any faith at all in their core business model, banning crypto mining is the obvious choice.

[_nalply]

Or that crypto mining is not really profitable.

Hetzner calculates tightly on the assumption that many renters don't tax the hardware. This assumption enables a profit on rented hardware. Like already said, arbitrage, but different: by taking away profit from Hetzner.

[robocat]

Also if there is a crypto-mining profit to be made, why wouldn’t Hetzner want to capture that profit themselves?

[Yizahi]

Same argument as with Nvidia for example. Why won't Nvidia just take part or all GPU and mine some tokens on them? Technically they can, but if they will do it, they are forfeiting every single tech innovation they have made over last decades in the area of graphics, drivers, interoperability, all the software they have created and so on. By doing that they will immediately stop getting revenue from that efforts and start losing non-crypto customers.

Same with Hetzner. They aren't just renting a box to people. They rent a box and SLAs, basically promises that that box performs as advertised. And to achieve that they have invested a lot, which will be pointless if they'll start mining themselves.

[capableweb]

Because Hetzner is a hosting company, not a cryptocurrency operation. Both of them are obviously two different things and just because you're good at one of them doesn't mean you're good at the other. Or maybe they simply prefer to offer hosting to people rather than a financial network, what do I know?