No, it's because it's an extraordinarily common fraud vector, and causes noisy neighbor problem because despite GP's remark about 'paying for resource usage', cloud providers don't actually anticipate anyone using 100% of CPU 24/7/365. And the folks who really are crypto mining are never going to pay their monthly invoice.

Source: Worked at a cloud infra provider that struggled deeply with this problem.

So you pay expecting full utilization but are expected to utilize on a fair-share basis only? And if I run my Monte Carlo simulation, which can take a week to complete, my instance is flagged for alleged crypto mining?

This generally depends on the tier of service you're paying for. Every infra provider offers tiers that provide dedicated resources. AWS handles this via CPU credits, other providers are less sophisticated.

Generally speaking you're not going to get banned unless you spin up max quotas and have other signals for fraud, such as zero payment history, connecting from regions with high fraud rates, etc. More often the provider will just limit your resources - either openly, like AWS does, or more subtly.

You don't know what the word fraud means, and I recommend reading these crazy things called 'terms of service'.

> The crime of stealing or otherwise illegally obtaining money by use of deception tactics.

> Any act of deception carried out for the purpose of unfair, undeserved and/or unlawful gain.

(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fraud#Noun)

Is the cloud provider getting money off of this arrangement? => Yes, obviously they're getting paid here.

Is the cloud provider getting that money as a result of deception? => Yes, by selling ex. the use of 1 CPU core when they actually have no intention of letting you use that core. Now, I'll grant that in an actual legal case it might well be possible to get away with this by burying it in the ToS, but this is HN, not a court room, so I'm comfortable setting the bar at "would most actual users expect that to happen based on marketing?", conclude that no, most users would consider that surprising even if there's something buried in the ToS claiming that it's allowed, and call a spade a spade.

the problem is that the terms of service say "don't mine crypto", and I'm not. they've set up an imperfect detection mechanism and I'm one of the false positives but have no meaningful way to prove my innocence.

the worst part is that there's somebody in a GCP office somewhere that might secretly believe that I'm actually a cryptobro. shudder

> the worst part is that there's somebody in a GCP office somewhere that might secretly believe that I'm actually a cryptobro.

you're probably safe on that front, it isn't like the GCP folks are paying any attention to the customers.

It's more akin to a gym membership. You can sign up to a gym promising you 24/7/365 access, but if you and a couple buddies decide to walk 1mph on the treadmill to work on your laptops from dusk til dawn, preventing anyone else from using them, you'll be asked to leave.

In either case (gym or GCP) you'll be entitled to a refund for the difference. They aren't allowed to just kick you out and pocket the difference.