Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blogs.nvidia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 762 posts

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

#631

Post by vmception »

R0b0t1 wrote: post #532
vmception wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I know how I'd do it but nobody paying me to do it so it's not really tractable for the time being. Is the mining payout actually attractive? I thought people were still running at a loss.

These realities change every minute and most mining calculators are super wrong.

For example, for Ethereum, mining calculators assume the block reward of 2 Eth, but for the past year each block has had like 5 Eth on average because the transaction fees are so high, extended periods of time with 7-10 Eth per block. So its double and triple the estimated payout if you are just taking a passing look.

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

#632

Post by MPSimmons »

jsheard wrote: post #279
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…

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…

Does this also happen during machine learning workloads?

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

#633

Post by brianvli »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #505
lurker619 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 howev…

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

I might be answering the wrong q, but the separate currency represents the cost of a transaction in the network. I.e. the amount you're willing to pay to send a transaction in the network and the amount a staker is willing to receive in exchange for validating your transaction

How else would you represent that cost in a crypto network? Some kind of currency needs to represent the transaction cost.

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

#634

Post by [deleted] »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #505
lurker619 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 howev…

[deleted]

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

#635

Post by jakeinspace »

SilverRed wrote: post #584
jakeinspace wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd think so, but that's not the case. Electricity is only running me around 7 cents / kWh, so when I say "net" I mean it. Ethereum is up 7x over the last year, and is largely driving the surge in GPU prices - if it weren't currently profitable, nobody would be buying modern GPUs for mining it. Regardless, even if I were losing money, 100% of the waste heat from my computer is doing actual useful work in heating my…

A heat pump would be far more efficient if you have the ability to install one in your room.

That's definitely true, but would be a significant additional cost. I'm just supplementing the gas furnace, which is controlled by a single thermostat. I could bump up the temperature for the whole house, but my room just happens to be particularly drafty, with 3 older bay windows which need to be replaced.

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

#636

Post by [deleted] »

BobbyJo wrote: post #331
throwaway0901 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does all mining apply here? I saw some videos where people were setting up solar panels and minig using that power. If you have a system of solar panels + mining cards, is there more harm compared to no such system (not taking producing solar panels and cards into account).

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…

[deleted]

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

#637

Post by ev1 »

Klwohu wrote: post #564
ev1 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is already not legal to use consumer cards for ML/AI/datacentre/commercial use according to their EULA and you are not permitted to install drivers at that point. They demand that you get an enterprise card

Violating an EULA isn't a violation of the law, is it?

At least in the US I would be unsurprised if hacking your way around it was federally a DMCA/CFAA felony.

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

#638

Post by faeyanpiraat »

skyzadev wrote: post #626
AlotOfReading wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since we're firmly in the ridiculous arguments camp already, it may as well be pointed out that all of that energy leaving the planet is a good thing. It's why the earth isn't a barren hellscape like venus, whose atmosphere captures energy much more efficiently. Most people would actually prefer that we capture just a bit less than we currently do.

So you are saying we will capture so much energy from the sun that the entire planet will become inhospitable. Do we then just keep burning fossil fuels until earth becomes inhospitable instead? Or do we kill ourselves and stop the need for energy use entirely? Remember that humans will forever have energy needs as we advance.

The point is that nothing is as simple as it seems. Using a renewable sources has their own side effects.

Solar? It heats the atmosphere, because it captures solar heat which would bounce back.

Wind? Obviously it slows winds down, and who knows how it affects the existing ecosystem. We know how important the gulf stream is, you wouldn’t want to slow that down..

Etc..

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

#640

Post by taurath »

ljm wrote: post #269
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…

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…

Bitcoin is magic cards without the game, that takes the power output of a medium sized country to maintain.
Post reply on HN