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Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

blogs.nvidia.com

331–340 of 762 posts

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#331
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The environmental issues are concerning to me. The amount of electricity being burned through for what is essentially a skeuomorphism of gold mining, pretty much primarily for speculation now, is beyond belief. It's a completely artificial, and artificially scarce, product. Whatever original hopeful goals the creator(s) of Bitcoin had with this idea, and decentralised currency...if there was any victory at all it is…

Does all mining apply here? I saw some videos where people were setting up solar panels and minig using that power. If you have a system of solar panels + mining cards, is there more harm compared to no such system (not taking producing solar panels and cards into account).

You have to look at the planet as a set of resources. Resources grow and shrink, but are definite and limited in any given moment all the same. Generally, spending them on less productive tasks is bad. It's cool they are using solar power vs burning gas/coal, but it doesn't change the fact that those same resources would benefit the planet much more if used in a different capacity.

If a billionaire hoarded manufacturing plants and kept them shut down, people would probably be mad, since resources were being wasted, even if it was a net positive on greenhouse gas output.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#332
post #215

Hahaha, this can't be real. Will they gimp the RTX-3060 in other applications like machine learning too? Will people who already bought these cards for mining have to watch out for updated drivers or firmware? This is an absolute nightmare scenario which will come back to haunt Nvidia for years. I can't believe they approved this. It'll be interesting to see how games perform on the newly gimped cards people already…

It is already not legal to use consumer cards for ML/AI/datacentre/commercial use according to their EULA and you are not permitted to install drivers at that point. They demand that you get an enterprise card

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#333
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The environmental issues are concerning to me. The amount of electricity being burned through for what is essentially a skeuomorphism of gold mining, pretty much primarily for speculation now, is beyond belief. It's a completely artificial, and artificially scarce, product. Whatever original hopeful goals the creator(s) of Bitcoin had with this idea, and decentralised currency...if there was any victory at all it is…

Does all mining apply here? I saw some videos where people were setting up solar panels and minig using that power. If you have a system of solar panels + mining cards, is there more harm compared to no such system (not taking producing solar panels and cards into account).

ultimately, it's a fraction of miners doing what you say. so as a green miner your personal contribution might be 0, but you're supporting a system that does considerable harm.

as long as a majority of bitcoin mining happens from non-renewable resources, the network as a whole is damaging.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always just around the corner, just like functional PoS. I won't believe it until I see it.

What do you want to see? Here's a list of Ethereum nodes that are staking 32 ETH, attesting blocks, getting rewards and slashes: https://beaconcha.in/validators Roughly $5.6b in value staked, with no particular expectation date for being able to withdraw. That's 2.55% of the total available ETH.

Also, layer-2 systems in production now can handle several thousand tx/sec, without usability or security compromises.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#335

I would normally be appalled by such an action, but the supply issues for RTX 30x0 cards are beyond ridiculous. Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation (I say that as someone who has put thousands of dollars into crypto in the past). Why should people who want to try some ML/DL at home (maybe they even nee…

The practical utility of crypto is such a joke when compared to the intended use cases that all of the speculators fawn over. The idea that crypto is a "store of value" seems like meager coping with the fact that transaction rates in a distributed system necessarily must suck compared to what Visa, et. al. are doing with IBM mainframes and racks of x86 hardware contained in the same datacenter (i.e. 1~2ms latency dom…

Try handling millions of automated machine to machine micro transactions per second on the Visa network. The Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin can handle this today.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#336
post #307
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Building more fabs is the general solution to the demand in silicon. And that's happening. But in the context of "I'd rather they have scaled up the demand", where "they' is Nvidia (or almost any other fabless semiconductor company), it's not a solution because it's impossible for them to build fabs or to foresee and plan for the supply chain disruption that was caused by COVID-19.

>it's impossible for them to build fabs or to foresee and plan for the supply chain disruption that was caused by COVID-19. This has been happening for half a decade, it is not remotely a COVID issue. And no, they can't build their own fabs but they can certainly invest (either directly or indirectly by securing larger orders at a higher price even more years in advance) all the premium so there's at more fabs at an…

It was only 2 or 3 years ago that AMD and Nvidia had to deal with a massive glut of silicon due to the collapse in mining.

Securing even more years in advance is a recipe for repeating that.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#337

It would be fantastic if mining activity could be detected at the hardware level in order to engage throttling. Honestly if cryptocurrencies are going to be a thing, it wouldn't make any sense for hardware makers to ever sell anything that could be used for mining. They could just build their own mining equipment, own the market, and not sell (or sell at a prohibitive markup) any hardware that makes serious mining pr…

no because they can more money annually selling cards than mining, beside investors don't put in money in nvidia because it engages in crypto but because it's a video card company.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#338
Releasing dedicated hardware for mining cryptocurrencies is the only way to go forward. Miners that use gaming hardware to mine must just be priced out of the market by more efficient dedicated hardware.

This happened for bitcoin. If you don't have latest ASIC you can't even dream of mining bitcoin unless your electricity costs nothing.

And even then you are still better off investing in ASIC as opposed to gaming hardware.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#339
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm trying to imagine what you think went through the mind of Satoshi Nakamoto. Do you imagine he just woke up one day and said "You know what I like? Carbon emissions! For no reason but carbon emissions! Somehow, I benefit from carbon emissions!". I really just don't think that's how it panned out.

Does it matter?

The reality is the same.

Re: Nvidia announces mining GPUs, cuts the hash rate of RTX-3060 in half

#340

It would be fantastic if mining activity could be detected at the hardware level in order to engage throttling. Honestly if cryptocurrencies are going to be a thing, it wouldn't make any sense for hardware makers to ever sell anything that could be used for mining. They could just build their own mining equipment, own the market, and not sell (or sell at a prohibitive markup) any hardware that makes serious mining pr…

no because they can more money annually selling cards than mining, beside investors don't put in money in nvidia because it engages in crypto but because it's a video card company.

Saying they can make more money selling the cards doesn't make sense if the cards are actually profitable to use as mining equipment. Plus, investors don't care if nvidia is a video card company or they sell toilet paper, they care about their performance as an investment. If nvidia could pivot and double your investment, would you really care what they were pivoting to?
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