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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

#501

Post by qqii »

postalrat wrote: post #408
qqii wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a miner's perspective there's little incentive (in cost difference) to get a mining specific card that doesn't hold its value when the mining craze is over compared to a general card which can be sold on the seccond hand market if necessary. The same criticisms were given last time nividia tried to make a mining card and obviously it didn't work as last time they didn't need to use artificial limits.

There will be when the mining cards cost 1/4 the price for the same performance/watt as the gaming cards.

Algorithms that are still protifable mine on GPUs were designed with ASIC resiliency in mind - they use memory hard algorithms.

This makes the problem of designing specialised mining cards equivalent to designing fast and efficient DRAM, an area where the consumer product is the cutting edge. This was by design to reduce hashrate centralisation.

Even the latest ethereum ASICs are only 10% more efficient, cost much more and can only mine ethash and its variants.

So as it stands I see no evidence that suggests mining cards will be cheaper with better efficiency, especially when the cryptocurrency community slowly moving away from mining.

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

#502

Post by PragmaticPulp »

csa wrote: post #452
andrepd wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sys…

> I will add that if any government views a digital coin as a threat to their fiat currency system

This fear is greatly exaggerated by people who have bought into the false idea that Bitcoin is the only way to escape inflation.

The definition of inflation is that asset prices go up. You can escape inflation by simply buying assets, or basically anything other than cash.

If someone truly believed massive inflation was coming, they would want to take out USD-denominated mortgages and buy houses. Inflation would increase the value of the houses and reduce the value of your loan repayments.

It's silly that so many people are afraid of the government devaluing their cash that they've decided the best way to escape it is to pile into an asset with an extremely lopsided distribution in favor of early adopters. The average person stands to gain more from recent stimulus than they stand to lose from inflation in their cash accounts. Doubly so if they invest their cash in stocks or assets, which doesn't even require Bitcoin.

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

#503

Post by vmception »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #402
vmception wrote: post #386

> 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

Or to just rearrange the operations so that the detection won't trigger.

Challenge accepted

Business opportunity because other miners will pay for the driver (or the mining software you make has the 2% mining fee to your address) or you can be the only one that has the driver and buys up all the rtx cards yourself if you have access to capital

vertically integrated is harder of course but could have the biggest payoff

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

#504

Post by mywittyname »

p1necone wrote: post #298
mywittyname wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a pretty clear cut market failure that's only possible because the barriers to entry are so high. I see that as a market success. People with lighter needs can purchase a neutered chip at a lower price. While people with greater needs can purchase an unlocked chip for a premium. An alternative is to only have one chip, which is priced higher than the neutered version. Because of lost sales, fewer people over…

It's a market failure because in a market with proper competition it wouldn't be possible for Intel to do this without being undercut by someone else on the higher end parts. If you're able to take e.g. an 8 core cpu, artificially disable 2 of the cores and sell the 8 core for $300 and the 6 core for $250, and still make a profit/break even on both of them then you could be selling the 8 core for $250 and your compet…

> sell the 8 core for $300 and the 6 core for $250, and still make a profit/break even on both of them then you could be selling the 8 core for $250 and your competition should be

It doesn't work that way. The $300 premium chips are where all of the margin is, and is what finances the whole operation. If they production costs of in your hypothetical chips is $235, then Intel would be making $15 on the cheap chips, but $65 on the premium ones. Which means that one premium chip is worth the 4.3x the margin of a cheap one.

Losing that premium segment is a big deal. Even if it is only 10% of the volume, because margins are so high, it ends up being like 40% of profits.

This isn't new. Just about every consumer goods market works like that, from peanut butter to cars. You need the middle tier to have enough volume to minimize production costs, but you need to find that premium offering to actually make money.

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

#505

Post by PragmaticPulp »

lurker619 wrote: post #344
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…

Ok I'll bite...Solana and other blockchains have cracked 50k+ tps. Mining is not required anymore with staked blockchains. Things are improving.

Sure, but why do we need a separate currency for all of this in the first place?

Once all of these cryptocurrencies and exchanges become fast, the price doesn't actually matter. If I can buy the crypto, transfer it, and exchange back out of the crypto to my target currency in seconds, it doesn't matter if SOL is at $0.01 or $100 per coin. If I'm only in it for a few seconds, I just buy and then immediately sell however many coins are needed to move my value from Point A to Point B.

The reason Bitcoiners don't want larger block sizes is that they don't actually want spending. They want Bitcoin to be an asset that only goes up in price. Spending and selling drive the price down, so those need to have high hurdles to discourage that behavior.

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

#506

Post by jawzz »

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.…

Solar panels and GPUs use rare metals of which there are a finite quantity, and are also mined through the use of slave labor in some parts of the world.

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

#507

Post by PragmaticPulp »

chiph wrote: post #318
cloudhead wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bitcoin (and the other coin systems) ultimately need to be able to handle transactions by a large number of users if they are to gain widespread acceptance. If I want to buy something with my coins, I don't expect to see "Sorry your transaction timed out. Please try again in a few moments". That is NOT confidence inspiring to me as the coin holder, and certainly not to the person/business expecting to receive my coin…

Bitcoiners don't actually want people spending Bitcoin.

The entire Bitcoin narrative has become buy and never sell (HODL). The more friction around transacting with your coins (other than buying) the better it is for the asset value.

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

#508

Post by Average_ »

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…

> I already do it for the video encoding limitations, why not this too?

That sounds pretty interesting. Mind elaborating on what changes you achieve with your modifications?

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

#509

Post by p1necone »

mywittyname wrote: post #504
p1necone wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a market failure because in a market with proper competition it wouldn't be possible for Intel to do this without being undercut by someone else on the higher end parts. If you're able to take e.g. an 8 core cpu, artificially disable 2 of the cores and sell the 8 core for $300 and the 6 core for $250, and still make a profit/break even on both of them then you could be selling the 8 core for $250 and your compet…

> sell the 8 core for $300 and the 6 core for $250, and still make a profit/break even on both of them then you could be selling the 8 core for $250 and your competition should be It doesn't work that way. The $300 premium chips are where all of the margin is, and is what finances the whole operation. If they production costs of in your hypothetical chips is $235, then Intel would be making $15 on the cheap chips, bu…

If your production cost is $235, then you need to make $235 to finance your operation. Anything more is inefficiency that competitors in a healthy market would eat away at.

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

#510

Post by bottled_poe »

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.

Objection. Fallacy - false equivalence.
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