FYI do not run blockchain related software on Hetzner nodes, even their dedicated bare metal. They are likely to shut the host down.
I was running a Solana Testnet Proof of Stake validator for work and they decided to shut the host down at the network layer and refused to give us access to the host. After my employer's legal threatened them, they offered to give us access back, but to be a pain in the butt, they only gave us console login access. Luckily, it was just our Testnet validator, and we keep the keys in cold storage which we were able to recover from.
Their nodes are cheap, but beware of Hetzner. Something that they didn't mind hosting for almost 4 years they suddenly changed their minds on and shut the host down.
https://www.hetzner.com/de/legal/terms-and-conditions/
number 8.1 in the German version, number 4 in the English one:
"Furthermore, the operation of applications for mining cryptocurrencies is prohibited. This includes, but is not limited to, mining, farming and plotting of cryptocurrencies. In the case of non-compliance, we are entitled to lock your access to the Service and/or to your account."
Lots of hosters and cloud providers have this and similar exclusions, to keep out the typically shady cryptocurrency crowd, their excessive resource usage, high payment risk and reputation damage.
E.g. Google Cloud also doesn't allow cryptocurrency stuff without prior approval, 3.3 iv: https://cloud.google.com/terms , same for AWS, 1.25: https://aws.amazon.com/service-terms/
So I hope you got your written approval first, otherwise AWS might be equally nasty to you.
Their ToS did not reference blockchain at the time. This is why our lawyers got involved. This was updated after they caused an outage unannounced for a service running almost four years.
Google actually offers blockchain rpc. Fwiw, Solana nodes run poorly in the cloud and generally only make sense on bare metal. As far as slow distributed databases go (aka blockchains), it’s 1000x+ faster than the ethereum style blockchains.
Ah, if that is new, then you are right, that's probably a breach of contract on their side.
Cloud doesn't necessarily mean virtual machines with scheduling and sharing problems. You can get non-shared machines with almost all popular cloud platforms, e.g. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/compute-optimized-mach...
Of course those aren't cheap.
I was just about to write that. No crypto scam nonsense in the same datacenter sounds like a plus to me.
(On a more serious note, I imagine the reason Hetzner does not want crypto-related stuff is for the same reasons most hosting companies are not very fond of porn-related sites: High rates of fraud, charge-backs and other potential legal liability).
They did officially stated on reddit [1] that they are not supporting crypto related hosting. Just wonder why? Is the GPU/CPU/Network related over use? Or legality related?
They stated that AFTER they just cut the network access to the hosts. It isn’t as though we were doing anything ethically or legally wrong. We were running rpc nodes for legit applications and a validator to secure the network.
For me, who’s worked in 50,000+ bare metal Linux environments before, it was just so surprising how sudden and violent it was. Their customer support was amazing until it wasn’t.
Just let it be a lesson, they will arbitrarily change their mind and put your nodes running your business at risk. Even if you’ve broken no laws and are operating in good faith. We were not running and proof of work nonsense that breaks the hardware or uses excess electricity.
> It isn’t as though we were doing anything ethically or legally wrong.
Legally? Well, they probably have a "if we think you do something we don't like we can kick you off" clause. Ethically? Eh .. Crypto. Ethical. Opinions differ.
I don't know any working thing using crypto in a way that it acutally make sense and couldn't be already be done easier and similiar safe.
Even in big companies you always see examples which break the technology like creating something on the blockchain which has a connection to the real world.
Try to send some big amount of money internationally and you will see why crypto is the future. With regular banks it takes days, weeks and many times months due to intermediate banks, AML questions, reviews, etc and have very high costs associated for simple transfers of money hardly earned.
With cryptocurrencies it takes seconds or minutes and no questions asked with very low fees
Energy use that doesn't deliver concrete value to the world. Mostly just speculators and gambling, but uses a a couple hundred TWh of electricity worldwide.
Yes yes I know, some applications are lower energy usage but parent comment is asking about the ethics of crypto in general.
> Energy use that doesn't deliver concrete value to the world
How is that any different from fast trading computers producing 'wealth' by juggling inflated derivatives and 'generating' water vapor value from hot air...
> Mostly just speculators and gambling, but uses a a couple hundred TWh of electricity worldwide.
Parent asked about ethics of crypto, the technology, in general. This comment isn't about the technology, but the applications, and doesn't answer their question.
I don't necessarily think we should separate applications from theory, but to be more crisp, I would probably say the facilitation of money laundering and funding of terrorist groups is something unethical.
Would you be shocked to know that US dollars are used more for both money laundering and funding terrorism than cryptocurrencies? Should we outlaw US dollars due to facilitating unethical uses?
> I don't necessarily think we should separate applications from theory
Sure, not in general, but shaism was specifically asking for theory, and you replied to them without actually answering their question. And you still haven't.
> the facilitation of money laundering and funding of terrorist groups
...and this isn't unique to crypto, either, so it's unclear that it's relevant.
You're angry in the wrong direction. It is not their fault that you, or someone in your company, didn't read their TOS.
Hetzners service is cheap, this attracts bad actors. In their eyes you are a bad actor and according to their TOS they're right. I, as a customer of Hetzner, are happy about how they deal with people abusing their services.
We read their ToS. Our lawyers read their ToS. It has a vague “we can kick you off if we choose to” part, but removing service with no recourse was not ok. So we told them we would sue them if they didn’t give us access to shred sensitive data and they relented.
This is the sentence, in Hetzners ToS, that you're referring to:
"In the case of non-compliance, we are entitled to lock your access to the Service and/or to your account." Source: https://www.hetzner.com/de/legal/terms-and-conditions/#16
If your lawyers thought that this line means something different than "don't use crypto, mining, etc. we will lock you out", you should change/sue your lawyers. This is a clear as it gets, I see zero fault on Hetzners side.
Honestly hetzner was never the 'high end / high quality' cloud provider for me.
They have decend hardware and infra but no encryption on rest and everything else a real business requires (certifications etc.).
But i'm so dismissive about all shitty crypto because no one ever showed me a good use case, as others said, i think its great that hetzner has this tos.
-So what do you actually do?- forget about it, finance got it...
Wild guess: They use significantly more electricity than the average customer that does just about anything else with their hardware. The GPU can easily run at hundreds of watts, and when you add in the required cooling you're probably at 1.5-2x that in total power usage.
This is not a proof of work (bitcoin or pre merge ethereum) node and it does not use more electricity. They singled out solana seemingly and I’m unsure why. We moved about 300 services off of dedicated higher end Hetzner nodes within a week.
My guess is it's a huge liability if keys are stolen, and it puts a huge target on their back from people around the world who want to steal crypto keys or DDoS crypto systems.
Yeah, that’s definitely not what we were doing buddy. Keep the politics out of this please.
We don’t accept any customer money either for this usage. Zero. Those nodes secured the network and were also used for analysis of hacks and forensic incident response. We work a lot with the US FBI btw. We’re trying to prevent literally all the things you just mentioned, so no need to be jerk here buddy.
Apart from how nonsensical it is to want to "keep politics" out of inherently political discussions: Your last comments on hacker news were about US trade policy, Navalny's treatment by Russia and the development of fringe political groups in the EU.
The conversation was not about views on blockchain. The conversion was hetzner decided a client running several hundred nodes was suddenly running afoul of the ToS after running happily almost four years and they cut off all access without any notification. They then updated their ToS to clarify this was not allowed, but they happily took our money for four years and we built out a fair bit of tooling on this.
We do DFIR and security. Do you even know anything about digital forensics? It’s not a “bad” thing to investigate hacks and work with law enforcement to recover funds. It’s necessary as not everyone is a crook or thief.
So yes, I think it’s entirely reasonable to keep conversations on hacker news on topic and not inject politics where the conversation is not about politics. Obviously the cases you mentioned are inherently about politics so that’s a nice straw man you beat up there. Congratulations sir.
They shut down my node, because of a "billing problem". (Card was unlocked for online payments, etc.) In response, I tried in vain to pay in advance, and in response my company is now blacklisted by them. It was for a new deployment, so no harm on my side, but it's kind of comical. I didn't even get around to run any services except for a web server with almost no traffic. (It was for a simple backend service, not for public consumption.)
Kind of comical!
Despite that I wouldn't have minded using them again, but never for something which I don't have redundancy with some other provider I can fall back to. AWS can go wrong too, but I think the risk of getting booted before even starting is very low with them.
They use to provide servers with Nvidia 1080 GPUs. Even though several generations of new GPUs appear, Hetzner didn't vend those new GPUs. Let's see what happens this time.
(Disclaimer: I love Hetzner and their business model/customer service.)
If you have a use case where you utilize Hetzner's RTX4000 GPU 24/7/365 around the clock, then it's a great deal. However, I think many people will just load some quantized LLMs into it and call it a few dozen times per day. For the latter use case, €2,200 is a bit too much, I think.
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I was running a Solana Testnet Proof of Stake validator for work and they decided to shut the host down at the network layer and refused to give us access to the host. After my employer's legal threatened them, they offered to give us access back, but to be a pain in the butt, they only gave us console login access. Luckily, it was just our Testnet validator, and we keep the keys in cold storage which we were able to recover from.
Their nodes are cheap, but beware of Hetzner. Something that they didn't mind hosting for almost 4 years they suddenly changed their minds on and shut the host down.
See: https://www.theblock.co/post/182283/1000-solana-validators-g...