Thread by @smdiehl

Let's talk about how crypto mining is hurting cloud computing and driving up the costs of the internet for everyone. (1/) 🧵

Cloud computing is in essence selling compute time on servers you that you rent and can customise, but don't own. Because of economies of scale Google and Amazon can run a better, faster, more reliable data centre than their users can. (2/)

SaaS (Software as a Service) are companies that offer software services that build on top cheap cloud computing servers. Many of these services involve testing or running custom business logic on behalf of users. (3/)

Baked into these service is the notion that you have to take arbitrary code from your users, which could do literally anything, and run it on servers that you purchase from Amazon or Google on behalf of your customers. (4/)

And this is where cryptocurrency has invented a whole new type of abuse. Malicious "customers" are now hijacking many services to run their miners on the company's dime. (5/)
drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cry…

This is particularly widespread in the Continuous Integration subsector of SaaS companies where these companies offer developer tools allowing their clients to integrate and test code with other developers. (6/)
blog.travis-ci.com/2020-11-02-tra…

Companies that used to offer free or discounted services for open source projects are forced to shutdown their free tiers in order to prevent massive amounts of signups from abusive users. (7/)
github.blog/2021-04-22-git…

It also drives up the server costs for legitimate companies that offer essential services to their customers, forcing them to pass on those costs to their honest legitimate users. (8/)
circleci.com/blog/how-we-fi…

Or the companies are forced to implement laborious controls and monitoring on compute time that destroy the usability of their product and hurt their company's growth and business model. (9/)
about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/09/0…

The cryptopaths are now playing an extremely sophisticated game of cat and mouse across multiple service vendors, all for the sole purpose of trying to squeeze out as many free compute cycles as they can to mine on someone else's dime. (10/)
blog.aquasec.com/container-secu…

Many have written about how crypto investments are a regressive tax on the poor and financially illiterate.

However this is now starting to boil over into other sectors of the economy and are now a tax on all of society for even using GPUS and cloud computing at all. (11/)

This is not a sustainable path, and at the moment there seems to be no technical solution to the problem from within our industry.

The only actions that can help mitigate this threat must come from regulators and policy makers cracking down on crypto through legislation.

/fin