yes, some part of aws somewhere is always online.

fully functional? 7.12.2021 alone was enough to kill that statement for the next few years.

Oh, thats an easy $20.

I mined Ethereum in azure during the height of the crypto boom, and looking at my statistics of vms i was able to get i am pretty sure some other people did to.

On 5k$ spend on azure i got round about 7k$ in Etherum when sold the next day, this includes german Sales tax and some loses i made starting out when not accounting for the german sales tax early on.

I think the whole timeline where this worked was about one and a half weeks(Germany, if you played around with exchange rates and sales tax potentially a bit longer), but it worked pretty well.

Azure was also perfectly fine with me doing it.

Yeah, and once that brief period of easy arbitrage was over, 100% of all people who are paying $10 to mine $1 worth of crypto are people who are trying to steal the $10.