Bitcoin mining? – Had to close my AWS account • Hacker News Board

Re: Bitcoin mining? – Had to close my AWS account

#11

Post by chmars » Sat, Mar 29, 2014, 2:16 AM UTC

williamstein wrote: post #9

I've spent a large amount of time fending of bitcoin miners from abusing my site https://cloud.sagemath.com . I like the mathematics and promise of bitcoin, but in practice it is an enormous waste of resources (time, electricity, etc.).

How does the abuse on your site happen?

Re: Bitcoin mining? – Had to close my AWS account

#12

Post by gesman » Sat, Mar 29, 2014, 2:29 AM UTC

You drive in a city at night and see all these office floors fully lit, and you wonder how many employees are having their office computers on mining bitcoins?

Re: Bitcoin mining? – Had to close my AWS account

#13

Post by hamburglar » Sat, Mar 29, 2014, 2:39 AM UTC

Had to close the account? I thought it was pretty trivial to nuke your old keys and generate new ones on AWS.

Re: Bitcoin mining? – Had to close my AWS account

#14

Post by gatehouse » Sat, Mar 29, 2014, 2:46 AM UTC

drpgq wrote: post #4

What would be the current payout in Bitcoins for $300 per day approximately?

Mining a popular coin that doesn't have ASICs yet ... maybe $5/day, very rough estimate.

Re: Bitcoin mining? – Had to close my AWS account

#15

Post by nvenky » Sat, Mar 29, 2014, 3:51 AM UTC

hamburglar wrote: post #13

Had to close the account? I thought it was pretty trivial to nuke your old keys and generate new ones on AWS.

It was my personal account which I was using for learning AWS. I did not have any apps running on that account. I initially deleted the keys and started terminating the instances. It was too exhausting to go through every region and terminate everything. So I ended up closing the account.

Re: Bitcoin mining? – Had to close my AWS account

#16

Post by cddotdotslash » Sat, Mar 29, 2014, 3:52 AM UTC

While I really feel badly for the person this happened to, I think we should stop expecting Amazon to foot the bill for these kinds of things. If I buy a new car and then leave the key sitting on the hood, I don't ask the car dealer to reimburse me when it gets stolen. Let's remember that Amazon is being incredibly generous by reimbursing users for these problems, but they should certainly not be expected to do so.

Re: Bitcoin mining? – Had to close my AWS account

#17

Post by nvenky » Sat, Mar 29, 2014, 3:54 AM UTC

a2tech wrote: post #3

Ouch. I'm sure Amazon will help him out..300/day is an expensive lesson to learn.

I hope so :) AWS was quick to send me the alert about unauthorised activity in my account

Re: Bitcoin mining? – Had to close my AWS account

#18

Post by molecule » Sat, Mar 29, 2014, 4:16 AM UTC

> Bitcoin mining? – Had to close my AWS account

> I had to close my AWS account to stop further charges and sent an email to the support team and hoping that they would consider that my account was compromised. I am guessing it is bitcoin mining incident again.

1. Unconfirmed that it was Bitcoin mining

2. Chose to close AWS account

Re: Bitcoin mining? – Had to close my AWS account

#19

Post by Buge » Sat, Mar 29, 2014, 4:20 AM UTC

jrockway wrote: post #5

drpgq wrote: post #4

What would be the current payout in Bitcoins for $300 per day approximately?

Even if it's a cent, who cares? This is just money laundering.

I was making a net profit for a while mining some scrypt based coins on AWS.

Re: Bitcoin mining? – Had to close my AWS account

#20

Post by Buge » Sat, Mar 29, 2014, 4:27 AM UTC

I'm surprised that it was large instances instead of GPU instances. GPU would be much more profitable if you are mining a scrypt coin (or sha256 coin but that would be stupid because of ASICs).

Maybe it was some other type of coin (I'm not sure if primecoin is more CPU-friendly).