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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

#381

Post by travisporter »

scotty79 wrote: post #327
serverholic wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake. Saying that virtual currency is wrong because the biggest currency is unwilling to innovate is wrong.

It doesn't matter. Gaming hardware will be used for mining as long as there is any single popular cryptocurrency that's POW and doesn't have dedicated ASICs.

On this point, I don't get why "ASIC resistance" is a feature of cryptocurrencies (Not that it's impossible, just something people like to say). We're in the same boat because no one can get a GPU, and at least those can game/do ML.

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

#382

Post by minitoar »

mtreis86 wrote: post #366
MereInterest wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's putting it in the best possible light. Mining gold leaves the world with physical blocks of gold, which has no continuous upkeep cost. "Mining" cryptocurrency leaves the world with an asset that requires continual upkeep (further "mining") in order to maintain that asset. Any significant drop in the network's hashrate opens it up to attacks. The upkeep cost for Bitcoin is, and by necessity must be, proportiona…

Gold has an upkeep, Fort Knox doesn't operate for free, neither does a bank.

Plus, gold was created by a supernova so you should take that energy into account as well.

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

#383

Post by tobasq »

jki275 wrote: post #259
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think China is in the habit of building hydroelectric plants in places where no one needs electricity? Also, a minute with Wikipedia and a calculator will show you that transmission losses for the longest possible straight distance in China are <5%.

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?

How many orders of magnitude in the Bitcoin CO2 footprint estimates do you think this vague theory can account for?

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

#384

Post by insertnickname »

cloudhead wrote: post #288
bob1029 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure why you would compare Visa with Bitcoin, unless you had no idea what you were talking about.. Visa does not enable one to transact without the rest of the banking system. It's useless on its own. Really pointless point of reference.

Satoshi compared Bitcoin to Visa in 2009.

>The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling. If you're interested, I can go over the ways it would cope with extreme size.

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

#385

Post by scotty79 »

127 wrote: post #364
scotty79 wrote: post #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 har…

A chip that can mine Ethereum well is also a chip that can do mass parallel general purpose computing well.

Wonderful. Maybe we could reuse Ethereum ASICs for AI.

The fact that people waste electricity gaming drove the development of GPUs that serve researchers. Maybe more general mining software will end up cheaply in hands of scientists as well?

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

#386

Post by vmception »

> RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent.

Its an opportunity for someone to hack the drivers

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

#387

Post by Strom »

arsome wrote: post #243

Sounds like it's time to crack some NVIDIA drivers. I already do it for the video encoding limitations, why not this too? Miners are willing to go to some really hacky extremes, reflashing firmwares, custom fan mods, extreme overclock configurations, etc to maximize hashrates and certainly won't care if they have to jump through some hoops to patch a specific version of the Linux driver or enable unsigned drivers on…

Indeed, I remember when I was doing some mining early in bitcoin's history. I had custom hacked BIOS on my AMD cards to be able to overclock beyond regular power limits. This flashing was possible only due to an exploit of the BIOS signature verification.

Given that I was doing this as only a rather casual miner with three GPUs, I have no doubt that this new restriction will be attacked ruthlessly.

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

#388

Post by Qworg »

chaosharmonic wrote: post #371
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 s…

Actual work can be monetized. The waste demonstrates commitment to the truth. Any non-waste reduces the security of the commitment, as you're getting paid no matter what.

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

#389

Post by DSingularity »

viraptor wrote: post #292
DennisP wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beacon chain is live with over $5 billion in ETH deposited so far, and has been running flawlessly since its December 1 launch. There are minor tweaks coming this summer. A few months after that, if everything still looks good, they'll migrate the legacy chain to it and proof-of-work on Ethereum will end. The migration is a decent amount of work but it's not the difficult research task that the beacon chain was. Some…

> they'll migrate the legacy chain to it and proof-of-work on Ethereum will end. Likely closer to: they'll create a mirror on the new chain and a group of unknown size will keep ETH 1 fork alive.

What will happen once the security guarantees of ETH2 eclipse ETH1?
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