The ToS says you cannot mine without their prior written approval.

My question is, why not? If mining is:

  • not on their free tier
  • being paid at a premium by you

Why would they care? They’re still making money aren’t they?

Mining XMR with my own computers at home is basically trading my electricity company fiat for XMR. Mining on AWS is trading fiat to AWS for XMR in that same manner.

Yes, you’d be mining at a loss, but if I expect XMR to go to $100,000 someday, it is worth it to me, isn’t it?

  • Dmitry
    3·
    2 days ago

    Lots of AWS instances get compromised and have crypto miners installed on them by hackers. AWS wants to know that the person paying for the server wanted the crypto mining to happen. The other issue is over provisioning. If you’re going to peg the cpu 100% of the time, vps vendors want you using bare metal or dedicated instances.

  • rideEnglish
    2·
    3 days ago

    someday, it is worth it to me, isn’t it?

    The chances of this happening are very high.

    • There may be legal reasons. Maybe nobody has anything against it, but they write it in to avoid falling into the trap of regulators. There are different laws around the world and you might have to comply with them.

    • The prices are presumably designed for the fact that users do not utilize one hundred percent of the CPU performance all day long. Even if it is billed according to use.

    • Perhaps they run mining software themselves in idle mode or reserve this option for themselves.