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

blogs.nvidia.com

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

#371

Post by chaosharmonic »

ralmidani wrote: post #50

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…

> Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation

I've actually been wondering about this -- are there any major ones that meaningfully provide other kinds of value for all of the computational resources they're using?

My understanding of blockchain as a concept is pretty surface-level, so maybe I'm just missing something obvious here. But at least at first glance, it kind of baffles me that so many of them are using seemingly arbitrary hash algorithms to calculate proof of work, when they could instead be tied to distributed projects -- folding@home, for instance -- and measuring actual work.

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

#372

Post by andrepd »

bob1029 wrote: post #114
ralmidani wrote: post #50

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…

Okay, does Visa offer distributed consensus and verifiable transactions with no central trusted authority? Then it's an apples to oranges comparison isn't it...?

By the same logic, trucks are useless and inefficient because my moped burns 1/100th of the fuel per km.

> This is not something that can be solved with current crypto approaches. There are information theory constraints regarding how long it would take to reach consensus across a distributed system and in such a way that transactions are serializable.

This is demonstrably false. Newer-generation coins offer better tps, and even bitcoin itself can manage due to things like segwit and lightning.

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

#373

Post by Answerawake »

hinoki wrote: post #290
jsheard wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone with early access to 3060 hardware, but not access to the launch drivers managed to wrangle it into working on pre-3060 drivers and still found that mining performance was artificially reduced. It starts high then falls off after a minute or so when some heuristic decides that mining is happening. https://videocardz.com/newz/zotac-geforce-rtx-3060-early-gpu... There's speculation that the limiter might actual…

So we’ll see mod chips for GPUs soon?

YES! I hope so if only to feel like I am back in the scene for just a moment. Miss those days. Maybe they can mod the VBIOS to show the crack group's logo on bootup just like how old VGA cards would show some company text before handing off to the PC.

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

#374

Post by tobasq »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #46
Thaxll wrote: post #15

Gamers hate miners, they're driving the price up, make hardware impossible to get ect ... It's a really problematic situation. Almost 6 month after launching new graphic cards from AMD / NVIDIA good luck gettting an RTX 30xx or 6800. On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing…

Not to take a side in this fight but i find the counter argument about the environmental cost of regular currencies interesting. How much co2 is emitted in the clearing of dollar transactions vs the clearing of bitcoin for example. That’s a whole lot of data centres. I’m not persuaded that we can put costs like legal (or even military) protection under just the dollar column - if you steal my $CO2COIN i can leverage…

It is estimated that the carbon footprint of a single Bitcoin transaction is 660 lbs of CO2 (not a typo), equivalent to that of 670,000 VISA transactions.

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

#375

Post by dpoochieni »

mullingitover wrote: post #329

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…

Thank goodness that's just your fantasy. Can't think of anything more useful to stave off leftism than cryptocurrencies (BTC specifically)

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

#376

Post by jki275 »

IshKebab wrote: post #300
jki275 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the bitcoin mining companies that run in China have a pretty good handle on how to get very low cost electricity, and hydro doesn't produce the CO2 emissions you're so concerned about. So what's your point?

His point is that crypto mining isn't using some carbon neutral electricity that was just lying around unused. If crypto minors didn't exist that hydro electricity would have been used for something useful. So by mining crypto unless you actually build extra hydro power stations for them you are 100% adding to CO2 emissions.

I don't think that point is accurate. At best, it makes a ton of assumptions that aren't warranted.

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

#377

Post by thomastjeffery »

CryptoGhost wrote: post #181
0xfaded wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the market for a card for computer vision stuff, but don't have steam.

Understood but Nvidia is justifying the changes by saying "we’re taking an important step to help ensure GeForce GPUs end up in the hands of gamers."

Games are the main audience that benefits, but not the only intended one.

Really, any consumer who isn't buying the card for mining is the intended beneficiary here.

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

#378

Post by jki275 »

philjohn wrote: post #351
jki275 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that the bitcoin mining companies that run in China have a pretty good handle on how to get very low cost electricity, and hydro doesn't produce the CO2 emissions you're so concerned about. So what's your point?

Ignoring the masses of people who mine in their own homes - e.g. pool miners on places like nicehash.

If you're talking about bitcoin, most btc is mined in China by Bitmain and one other company.

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

#379

Post by [deleted] »

bhaak wrote: post #73
krsdcbl wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite get why everyone seems to get onto the environment train with crypto but seem to have had no issues with gold

Warren Buffett, the renowned investor, famously dismissed gold in a speech given at Harvard in 1998. He said: “It gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or some place. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.” It sucks that gold is so desired just for its look. If it were cheaper it wou…

[deleted]

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

#380

Post by scotty79 »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #370
scotty79 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great demand usually does great things for the future of supply and since renewables are getting cheapest I think they will get the most development in the future. We may end up with way more resilient power grid and abundance of clean energy thanks to cryptocurrencies.

This is a very hot take! If you believe this, you should oppose all measures to conserve energy, and advocate for dumping as much energy into the atmosphere as heat waste as possible. There’s nothing about the argument that applies to crypto more than any other energy use.

Energy dumped as heat into the atmosphere does nothing bad to the climate.

And I am not particularly for any energy conservation measures. Except for isolating buildings because most dirty stuff we burn is for that purpose and not isolating your home is just negligence.

Wasting electrical energy is only bad because it came from burning stuff. But I don't think any fossil fuel power plant was closed because people used less. Maybe some were not built because of that, but then some renewables and nuclear power were not built for that reason as well and I believe that's very bad.

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