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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

#511
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really wish Nvidia would do this across the RTX product line. I'd rather they have scaled up the demand. They've had years of this to take the higher profits and invest them. Even if people don't use them for mining, the demand for Machine Learning is there - instead GeForce cards have been banned for use in data centers for years. Not to mention that the crippling of 3060 would be trivial for mining operations t…

I understand Nvidia is no angel. And I'm totally OK with them doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Also, my concern is not for data centers running creepy ML models that invade users' privacy, but for the average home user who wants to get started with ML and at the same time get decent frame rates when they play a game.

> but for the average home user who wants to get started with ML and at the same time get decent frame rates when they play a game.

Getting started with ML doesn't require a GPU at all. Realistically, any video card or even a modern CPU is more than sufficient to get started with ML learning.

It's a myth that $1000 gaming video cards are necessary or even helpful for learning basic ML.

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

#512

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…

Fundimental supply issues aren't going to be solved by releasing a mining variant and artificially limiting a gaming variant. At the end of the day this is still a supply and demand problem. I bet that we'll still see 3060s being scalped and brought at ridiculous markup.

Just becuase your use case is more noble doesn't change the fundimental issue of supply and demand. Nividia also already has artificial restrictions on their GTX and RTX lines to produce a product for your use case: the Tesla series.

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

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> skeuomorphism of gold mining I'm gonna steal that one, thanks. :D

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…

Did you know that vanilla financial securities also require upkeep? Approximately 0.5% of the value of all financial assets is burned every year (and potentially an order of magnitude more, depending on what asset and packaging you're talking about).

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

#514

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.

For those that aren't cryptocurrency enthusiasts it literally doesn't matter. As long as bitcoin and ethereum mining remains they'll always have something they disagree with to point at.

Unlike enthusiasts they don't see it as a necessary step and haven't been following the long and arduous journey of developments and breakthroughs to get here.

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

#515

It's nice that Nvidia gets to artificially restrict what I can do with their products after I buy them. I had this problem years ago...I bought a USB video adapter to enable using a second screen while my main screen was running games...they had code in the driver to disable things like physx if a second display was detected.

But the RTX 3060 hasn't launched yet?

Sounds like they're using software to artificially limit the capabilities when it comes out.

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

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are the highly technical users of HN still this ignorant when it comes to a widely adopted 11 year old technology. The main value coming out of Bitcoin is that it is not regulatable by any party, including nation states. You can take your Bitcoin across borders. No one can stop Bitcoin sales like they did with GME. The whole point is to cut middle men and central authorities out of the picture. There is no other…

When the whole conversation starts by talking about environmental externalities, you don't get to hide behind totally-not-criminals who are happy to pay the cost to avoid regulations; we are all paying the costs.

Ok, but that wasn't what the comment I was responding to was talking about at all. An equivalent example would be me saying the value proposition of guns is not that they are pretty but that they propel objects at high speed, and then you arguing that I'm wrong because criminals use them. I'm not arguing the moral dimension at all, but the mechanism.

I'm not a fan of using so much energy, just as I'm not a fan of guns. What does that have to do with discussing how they work and why people use them?

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

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are the highly technical users of HN still this ignorant when it comes to a widely adopted 11 year old technology. The main value coming out of Bitcoin is that it is not regulatable by any party, including nation states. You can take your Bitcoin across borders. No one can stop Bitcoin sales like they did with GME. The whole point is to cut middle men and central authorities out of the picture. There is no other…

Yeah let's use more efficient cryptocurrency. Bitcoin was really excellent for PoC but should not be used anymore.

Agreed, but that is complete a different matter to the comment I was responding to. The point is that people don't understand why PoW is not going away because they don't even understand the value proposition of PoW cryptocurrency.

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

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The long term road map for Ethereum 2 is 100k transactions per second. This is a theoretical maximum and it will likely take years to get there. This defies your assertion that scaling cannot ever be achieved with current crypto approaches.

Always just around the corner, just like functional PoS. I won't believe it until I see it.

Then perhaps you should look at the numerous functioning proof of stake projects that exist?

I'm the top 25 market cap there's:

BNB (powering the Binance Smart Chain) DOT (Polkadot) ADA (Cardano) ATOM (Cosmos) EOS TRX (Tron) NEM

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

#519

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…

Did you know that vanilla financial securities also require upkeep? Approximately 0.5% of the value of all financial assets is burned every year (and potentially an order of magnitude more, depending on what asset and packaging you're talking about).

That's a heck of a figure you're not providing a reference or explanation for at all. Or even an explanation of what you mean by financial securities and "burned".

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

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The long term road map for Ethereum 2 is 100k transactions per second. This is a theoretical maximum and it will likely take years to get there. This defies your assertion that scaling cannot ever be achieved with current crypto approaches.

Okay, so for the foreseeable future: "The practical utility of crypto is such a joke when compared to the intended use cases that all of the speculators fawn over" Not really a change in semantics here. It's still the point that crypto promised a LOT of really cool things for fintech that realistically won't materialize for a long time.

Like what?

With the recent defi boom and the increased trust and popularity in oracles serving off chain data I'd say that you can find a cryptocurrency project for most promises.

Not being popular or adopted is another issue.

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