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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

#481

Post by iujjkfjdkkdkf »

px43 wrote: post #444
BobbyJo wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 manufactur…

Each hour 430 quintillion Joules (430 exajoules) of energy from the sun hits the Earth.[1] It is almost exclusively reflected back out into space, and wasted. We have nearly no incentive to capture it, so the energy is being wasted at a mind boggling scale. I've been mining cryptocurrencies with solar power for about 6 years or so. The great thing about crypto mining is that it creates a price floor for energy usage.…

I've been just casually browsing this discussion, but your comment stands out as an example of the kind of mental gymnastics people are playing to try and justify something so obviously wasteful.

As was pointed out upstream, capital and resources are required to get a solar panel, and if its output is directed to something frivolous like crypto mining, those inputs are being wasted. The fact that there remains unused energy from the sun is completely orthogonal to the waste that is happening.

To be clear, I'm less passing a judgement about the efficiency of crypto than I am pointing out that crafting objectively absurd arguments about why it is not actually wasteful helps nobody.

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

#482

Post by wruza »

tinco wrote: post #462
wruza wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So let’s wait until BTC hits $100k and a generic videocard for any purpose costs $5000. That would be much better than paying extra $200 over MSRP for ML. /s

What ML card are you buying that is only $200 over its gaming equivalent?

I don’t, that was a blind guess that missed. Insert a real extra and compare to the prospect of crypto prices rising and nvidia doing nothing. What would ML people gain from that while gamers lose all?

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

#483

Post by PragmaticPulp »

jki275 wrote: post #378
philjohn wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, which is a major problem for the decentralized currency narrative. It also creates a massive incentive for market manipulation to continue keeping prices high enough for them to get ROI on the mining investment.

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

#484

Post by codebje »

Krasnol wrote: post #353
ljm wrote: 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…

Is there any reliable data on the actual environmental harm? I've heard so many times that it's renewable energy being used because it's so cheap. There was something about mining near dams.

The upper bound on environmental harm is the damage that would be done by the most harmful energy production method used: any renewable energy spent on mining could be used instead to replace that harmful production.

(It's only an upper bound because energy isn't perfectly fungible.)

Renewable energy is also better than fossil energy in terms of environmental damage, but it's not free from damage. A dam is a massive localised environmental impact, and a huge amount of concrete. A solar farm requires (holes-in-ground) mining and significant industrial processing to build. The lower bound on environmental harm is the cost of building renewable energy sources that are used for something so unproductive.

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

#485

Post by qqii »

mullingitover wrote: post #477
qqii wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nividia can't just suddenly decide to keep cards for themselves for mining, they have pre arranged agreements to fulfil with their partners. Pivoting and creating a mining division also doesn't make sense - mining companies take on a lot more risk from volatile market prices and need to have a lot more cash on hand to sustain the long periods of unprofitability.

Sure, I'm not saying nvidia would just decide to stop shipping tomorrow. However, if crypto is really viable and long-term profitable, it wouldn't make a ton of sense for them to give their potential competitors (e.g. anyone else who wants to mine) capital equipment at what would amount to a loss. They could subcontract the operation of the mining equipment to third parties so they make a profit immediately selling t…

I'm sure they already have such agreements, but little is know about them as that would upset their target market.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/76468/cant-buy-new-ampere-gpu...

> if crypto [mining] is really viable and long-term profitable

This is still a big if, with the most profitable gpu mining crypto moving to proof of stake in the next few years it's unclear if gpu mining will be as viable.

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

#486

Post by emteycz »

infogulch wrote: post #425
emteycz wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure everyone on this site is capable of opening Ethereum homepage by themselves.

Since we've gone meta anyways... Why do so few people value simply linking to and quoting directly from primary sources? From random internet comment #37846399, to sms chats, to user stories on a scrum board, and even news articles these days, nobody cares to drop a link to or actually quote the thing they're referring to. Docs, articles, code, journals... Yes, it's work to back up your claims with direct links to a…

I am not the first one who made a claim in this thread - your reply would be better placed under that comment talking about gold. Surely opening the homepage is reasonable minimum before posting a negative comment.

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

#487

Post by PragmaticPulp »

cybrexalpha wrote: post #9

Have nvidia lost their minds? It's going to take days for mining operations to reverse-engineer the driver and undo this. So commercial operations won't be affected at all. Worse, their detection isn't going to be 100% perfect. What if After Effects does something that looks "kind of" like mining. Is it just going to be crippled? What will nvidia do then? Suggest I buy a Quadro for AE support? This will only penalise…

> This will only penalise average users.

How?

Currently, average users can't get their hands on any of these cards because they're being bought in bulk by crypto miners. As soon as mining becomes unprofitable, the market will be flooded with cards that have been run 24/7 for months or years, which isn't a recipe for a good experience.

The average user can only benefit from getting access to these cards again. nVidia knows they can't afford to burn goodwill with their customers, whom they depend on to buy card upgrades every few years.

> Worse, their detection isn't going to be 100% perfect. What if After Effects does something that looks "kind of" like mining. Is it just going to be crippled? What will nvidia do then?

nVidia isn't a resource-limited startup. They have a lot of smart people. They're obviously going to test the firmware against common workloads.

Regardless, don't buy a card unless you know it does what you want it to do. These cards are all mining-limited from day 1, so it's not like the performance will regress suddenly.

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

#488

Post by Retric »

tikwidd wrote: post #414
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…

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.

Those same apparatus are also needed to maintain a global internet without which Bitcoin is useless. You can also just bury gold to keep people from finding it, which is one of the reasons it’s maintained value throughout history.

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

#489

Post by tinco »

wruza wrote: post #482
tinco wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What ML card are you buying that is only $200 over its gaming equivalent?

I don’t, that was a blind guess that missed. Insert a real extra and compare to the prospect of crypto prices rising and nvidia doing nothing. What would ML people gain from that while gamers lose all?

Yeah, the ML example doesn't really work because we're already paying through the nose for the privilege of running GPU's in production processes. This development is really nothing new, Nvidia and ATI (and Intel and AMD) have always charged extra for their "professional" lineups usually enforced through software alone or even just the EULA.

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

#490

Post by PragmaticPulp »

autokad wrote: post #472
loktarogar wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the vast majority of mining happens off renewable energy, because it doesn't make economic sense to mine on non-renewables. its why 'mines' cluster near hydro plants and places that have good solar.

> because it doesn't make economic sense to mine on non-renewables

That's not true at all.

You can enter a power cost into this calculator: https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator/nvidia-rtx...

It comes out positive using energy prices from virtually anywhere.

The idea that mining is powered purely by renewables that would somehow otherwise go to waste (that is, not take fossil fuel plants offline) is pure FUD.

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