Microsoft bans crypto mining from its online services

[FP91G]

UPDATED Microsoft has quietly banned cryptocurrency mining from its online services, and says it did so to protect all customers of its clouds.

The Windows and Azure titan slipped the prohibition into an update of its Universal License Terms for Online Services that came into effect on December 1. That document covers any "Microsoft-hosted service to which Customer subscribes under a Microsoft volume licensing agreement," and on The Register's reading, mostly concerns itself with Azure.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/15/microsoft_online_services_cryptomining_ban/

[1714898773]

1714898773

[swogerino]

UPDATED Microsoft has quietly banned cryptocurrency mining from its online services, and says it did so to protect all customers of its clouds.

The Windows and Azure titan slipped the prohibition into an update of its Universal License Terms for Online Services that came into effect on December 1. That document covers any "Microsoft-hosted service to which Customer subscribes under a Microsoft volume licensing agreement," and on The Register's reading, mostly concerns itself with Azure.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/15/microsoft_online_services_cryptomining_ban/

Nothing new from the front I think,people abused their AWS subscriptions before while I am not that updated on Google Cloud Computing but I believe to have been the same and now lastly is Microsoft the third giant of cloud services to prohibit such thing.

It is just a normal move from Microsoft and I don't think that this was a big part of mining in general,very few people who had access to such resources used them to their personal benefit,the general miners they do mine with mining gears they buy and setup themselves.

[rdluffy]

I thought it was already forbidden before.
There was a time when Microsoft gave away a month of Azure for free, if I'm not mistaken with 200 dollars, and people used it a lot to mine XMR, there's even some threads here with tutorials.
I didn't know that the ban came only now.  

Do you know if Amazon banned mining too?

[Daltonik]

The Microsoft ban concerns the ban on unauthorized use of servers for mining, in order to continue using servers for mining, it is necessary to obtain approval after submitting a request to Microsoft support, which I think the major players will use.

https://www.microsoftpartnercommunity.com/t5/Azure-Solution-Area/Important-actions-partners-need-to-take-to-secure-the-partner/td-p/82850

[joker_josue]

UPDATED Microsoft has quietly banned cryptocurrency mining from its online services, and says it did so to protect all customers of its clouds.

Nothing new from the front I think,people abused their AWS subscriptions before while I am not that updated on Google Cloud Computing but I believe to have been the same and now lastly is Microsoft the third giant of cloud services to prohibit such thing.

Totally agree! This type of service is not for mining and is not prepared for this level of use.

Of course, if there were a few cases, it is bearable, but if it starts to escalate, everything becomes more complicated and alarms go off in the system.

I believe that because of the devaluation of currencies and the rising cost of energy, many have remembered to test/use these services to continue mining.

[FP91G]

Countries restrict miners from using electricity to mine bitcoin, but there are no such restrictions for data centers. If mining is going to bring in a good income, then data centers have good advantages for mining with lucrative contracts for the supply of electricity.

[swogerino]

Countries restrict miners from using electricity to mine bitcoin, but there are no such restrictions for data centers. If mining is going to bring in a good income, then data centers have good advantages for mining with lucrative contracts for the supply of electricity.

That is a good option but the data centers are geared toward mining farms,big ones and big ones can agree for such contracts,for home miners who may have thought remotely to try and rent such a service from the cloud providers is not an option from quite some time now from other providers and lately from Microsoft.Most likely even others like Line and Digital Ocean which come right after the big three ones will do such thing as for the moment I don't know that Digital Ocean is restricting such services so those who want to try can try from other providers but is not lucrative at all for small users.

[FP91G]

Countries restrict miners from using electricity to mine bitcoin, but there are no such restrictions for data centers. If mining is going to bring in a good income, then data centers have good advantages for mining with lucrative contracts for the supply of electricity.

That is a good option but the data centers are geared toward mining farms,big ones and big ones can agree for such contracts,for home miners who may have thought remotely to try and rent such a service from the cloud providers is not an option from quite some time now from other providers and lately from Microsoft.Most likely even others like Line and Digital Ocean which come right after the big three ones will do such thing as for the moment I don't know that Digital Ocean is restricting such services so those who want to try can try from other providers but is not lucrative at all for small users.

I was interested in IT people who rent space for their servers in data centers. For ordinary users, standards for equipment have been established, this is only server equipment for installation in special PC racks. Buying such equipment for mining is not always profitable. And very old equipment may not be accepted.

[joker_josue]

Countries restrict miners from using electricity to mine bitcoin, but there are no such restrictions for data centers. If mining is going to bring in a good income, then data centers have good advantages for mining with lucrative contracts for the supply of electricity.

But in that case, it can compensate the miner to open a company as a Data Center, and rent a warehouse to place the mining machines and the respective data centers for mining.

It's just that using cloud services from Microsoft, Amazon, Google or others may be appealing but it's not recommended. Because these servers were not designed to support mass mining, and this could affect the performance of the equipment for other customers. This is not in the interest of these companies, as it will lower the level of quality they want to offer.

[FP91G]

Countries restrict miners from using electricity to mine bitcoin, but there are no such restrictions for data centers. If mining is going to bring in a good income, then data centers have good advantages for mining with lucrative contracts for the supply of electricity.

But in that case, it can compensate the miner to open a company as a Data Center, and rent a warehouse to place the mining machines and the respective data centers for mining.

It's just that using cloud services from Microsoft, Amazon, Google or others may be appealing but it's not recommended. Because these servers were not designed to support mass mining, and this could affect the performance of the equipment for other customers. This is not in the interest of these companies, as it will lower the level of quality they want to offer.

You can check my words even on your PC. Mining sometimes consumes less power and generates less heat than normal workloads such as rendering, AI calculations, or general archiving. Microsoft, Amazon are very cunning and want to rent a server to as many customers as possible.

[joker_josue]

You can check my words even on your PC. Mining sometimes consumes less power and generates less heat than normal workloads such as rendering, AI calculations, or general archiving. Microsoft, Amazon are very cunning and want to rent a server to as many customers as possible.

Yes, it is true, but this is the objective of these companies to obtain the best possible performance with the equipment they have available.

I didn't mean that mining uses more energy resources than other tasks. It all depends on what you are mining. The question what is the time used, where mining uses 100% of the time, no matter the number of resources used. As it is being used at 100% nothing else can be done.

These companies set up their business in such a way that the servers serve several clients around the world, at the same time, according to the use of each one. That's why they manage to do low prices. It's not a matter of being smarter or not, it's their business model.

[OgNasty]

I'm sure their lawyers are the ones who come up with the explanations of why they do things, but I'm not certain if that's the actual reason.  I don't think it has to be so complicated or have to do with security.  Mining is pretty hardware intensive so for something like online services it has to be the worst thing a client could be doing to your resources.  I imagine if they were to allow this sort of use of their systems, they'd have to raise the price to compensate, so rather than do that and hurt their customer base, they are just excluding the problem.  Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

[fmz89]

Looks like people now days hate mining and green industry became popular now than ever, bitcoin wont switch to pos, og and maximalist support only pow, and they exactly now how pow is only true way to get base price  from cost of mining just like gold, vc & many big investors want crypto all became pos or any form of green energy…

[FP91G]

Another possible reason:
Since late 2021, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have lost over 80% of their value. The negative trend impacted the mining industry.
Bitcoin miners have had to auction a large portion of their BTC supply to maintain their operations. Therefore, the report noted, “Microsoft might be worried that miners would not pay their cloud bills.”
https://bitcoinist.com/microsoft-issued-ban-crypto-mining-online-services/