News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Show HN: A Marketing Bot That Sells OpenStack Cloud Insta... by kordless on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @01:17PM (#8070201)
I had a rather engrossing conversation about a runaway version of one of these eating all our compute. One of the individuals in the conversation came up with a way to incentivize efficiency in the network, so we all calmed down a bit afterwards. I still wonder about it though.
Re:Show HN: A Marketing Bot That Sells OpenStack Cloud Insta... by patio11 on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @01:28PM (#8070289)
Good news: Bitcoin can't go Clippy because you can't get > X compute for X compute's cost in BTC, at virtually any margin, to say nothing of the scales required to e.g. meaningfully impact availability at any major cloud provider. Ask if you care about the economic or engineering details, but typically, people running Bitcoin mining on public clouds are doing so to exfiltrate value from accounts or payment methods which they have stolen, in a way which is fairly difficult for law enforcement to combat. (That or they're enthusiasts who either don't particularly care about monetary incentives or should have spent a wee bit more time reading about currently successful mining strategies.)
Re:Show HN: A Marketing Bot That Sells OpenStack Cloud Insta... by wmf on Tuesday July 22, 2014 @02:00PM (#8070530)
To eat all your compute it would have to outbid everyone else, which would probably mean it was creating an incredible amount of value.

Which is also a roundabout comment on VC-backed vs. bootstrapped companies.