Live data from Hacker News

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

blogs.nvidia.com

451–460 of 762 posts

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

#451
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

A chip that is good at general parallel computing is a good as an ethereum mining. A chip thst is good at ethereum mining doesn't necessarily have to be good at general parallel computing.

ASICs are ASICs, application specific.

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

#452

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…

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 r…

> does Visa offer distributed consensus and verifiable transactions with no central trusted authority?

Ok, I’ll bite.

No, it doesn’t, but what is that actually useful for?

The best answer I can come up with is illegal activities and libertarian fantasies.

Even if one generously frames “illegal activities” in the context of financial freedom from a tyrannical regime, even that has limits.

Any regime with a banking system can implement a KYC-type of policy that will can make interacting financially with anything related to BTC difficult or impossible. Need a modern example? Look no further than online wallets (e.g., Neteller) and online poker sites after the UIGEA.

I will add that if any government views a digital coin as a threat to their fiat currency system, it will be trivially easy for them to make that currency an extremely inefficient store of value. The measures will be draconian towards coin holders, but most people (rightly or wrongly) won’t care.

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

#453

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…

But the upkeep cost of protecting the gold is continuous in the same way as bitcoin mining. If you want to own some gold you need to protect it (usually with the state apparatus of violence, which has massive externalities). In other words, if you just mine a physical gold block, you don't really have an asset without the state's (or your own) continual upkeep that keeps it protected from attacks.

> But the upkeep cost of protecting the gold is continuous in the same way as bitcoin mining.

This completely misses the point, which was one of magnitude:

>> The upkeep cost for Bitcoin is, and by necessity must be, PROPORTIOANAL TO THE VALUE REPRESENTED by Bitcoin.

Also, that upkeep cost is 100.00% to protect the value of existing bitcoin.

C.f., gold:

> If you want to own some gold you need to protect it (usually with the state apparatus of violence, which has massive externalities).

I don't need continuous mining of bitcoin to protect my non-bitcoin stuff.

However, I do need the "state apparatus of violence" to protect my non-gold stuff, including things like my house and my body, and oh yeah, my fucking mining rig!

If all gold disappeared tomorrow, would anything about the "state apparatus of violence" change? No, of course not. That is absurd.

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

#454
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we’ll see mod chips for GPUs soon?

Or the CMP line will actually fit the needs, and no need for games of whack a mole.

It basically depends on three things though. The CMP card supply needs to be sufficient for the miners' demand, they can't be more expensive, and the question of how much does being able to resell the cards to gamers play into the value proposition.

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

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Nice one Actually though, I wonder if there's an analogy that could be drawn between the real origin of gold (supernova) and bitcoin (mining a block). Both are created as dense byproducts of a large compression event (bitcoin: transactions; supernova: the rest of the star). ?

There's nothing special about gold, every other heavy element is also a by-product of supernovae. So, the analogy only works on a dully contrived poetic level, unless you also want to compare Bitcoin meaningfully with lead.

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

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How would that be possible?

If no one wants to buy the old ETH, then it won't be profitable to mine, so no one will mine it. Without mining there is no security (as far as the old PoW chain is concerned.)

Kind of like how Ethereum Classic (ETC) is subject to 51% attacks every other week and requires multiple days' worth of confirmations after deposit to any exchange.

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

#458
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…

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…

I'm really curious about how they got the card working without the specific drivers for it.

I'm also curious if this "mining detection" is going to kick in "accidentally" on other compute loads. It would be really crappy if the CUDA performance of these cards is bad because they don't want miners using them.

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

#459
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought them through a IT reseller, at more or less retail price around here.

Honest question: Have you calculated your profits now VS what your profits would have been if those same $$ purchased the cryptocurrency of your choice on the day you bought the cards instead? Which would have been more profitable (taking selling the equipment after into consideration as well).

I did this kind of calculation during the 2017 bubble. It mostly depends on the future price of the cryptocurrency. From my calculations mining was less risk for less reward compared to purchasing the crypto directly.

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

#460
post #412
post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

As does the statement that because hydro dams are being used mining is not doing environmental damage.

But that’s not what I said. I said the amount of CO2 being generated was probably not as high as you might expect from a naive reading of the kWh consumed.
Post reply on HN