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Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

bleepingcomputer.com

211–220 of 818 posts

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The casual customer will still be buying GPUs 10 years from now. The bulk order GPU miners will stop ordering GPUs the minute mining becomes unprofitable. With proof-of-stake and ASICs on the horizon, this could happen rather abruptly. When miners are done with GPUs, they're going to unload them on the secondary market. The used GPU market is going to be flooded with GPUs that have been overclocked and run with the d…

This doesn't really make sense to me. What would the "casual customer" do if nvidia didn't introduce this segmentation? Would this completely halt the gaming industry such that 10 years from now no one would even consider buying a GPU? I don't believe that. Also, if they're able to produce both consumer GPUs and miner GPUs to meet both demands, what's stopping them from doing it now? Is it not worth their while at cu…

Nvidia does not want to hike the prices because last time they did this in the same circumstances they lost a lot of goodwill.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#212
post #125

I have a dumb theoretical question, but I genuinely don't understand the answer. Why wouldn't nvidia and amd or any other card maker just keep the cards and mine all the cryptocurrency for themselves?

Cryptocurrency value is extremely volatile, businesses need stable income streams to plan for development and growth. Further, just owning cryptocurrency isn't enough, it has to be converted into spendable money so that the business can pay employees and fund other business expenses, at Nvidia's scale this creates a lot of financial friction and undesirable complications.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#214
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to be a fun future game of cat-and-mouse as miners figure out how to disable/bypass nvidia’s electronic countermeasures.

Couldn't one just not upgrade their drivers? NVIDIA has no way of crippling an offline system.

Cards that have already been sold don't matter. New cards however become worthless to miners so the demand should go down as well as the prices.

We will probably see cards with old firmware show up on eBay for a lot more money than new cards.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#215

Total hardware noob here. How do they do it? Is there a particular instruction that ETH needs to be "efficient" but games can live with throttled? Or perhaps a sequence of instructions that's signature to ETH?

Going to be a fun future game of cat-and-mouse as miners figure out how to disable/bypass nvidia’s electronic countermeasures.

Probably not much of a cat-and-mouse game. Once they can bypass it once, all they have to do is not update. Unless Nvidia is prepared to release new hardware revisions every time.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#216
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because it's just not their business. They don't need to confuse their objectives with bitcoin to get rich, they're doing exceptionally well without it

Then why is Elon Musk trading Bitcoins? Tesla makes more money trading Bitcoin than selling cars. https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-makes-more-money-trading-...

In addition to the revenue from selling cars. The GP was asking why Nvidia doesn't stop selling their cards and use them to generate bitcoin as a mining company.

Tesla simply took some of their cash and invested in Bitcoin, they didn't shift production or pivot their business.

The fact that they made money off of the investment and whether or not it was more than their revenue is irrelevant, the move didn't affect their core business, it was just lucrative.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#217
post #2

Does this behavior anger anyone else on a deep level? I get that its hard to buy GPUs right now, but this seems like such an attack on general purpose computing. Hardware manufactures already segment features between consumer and busness grade parts that the silicon itself is capable of, such as virtualization, but restricting what algorithms one can run is a whole new level. I am pretty sure my next GPU is going to…

It's honestly pretty surprising to me to see how many people on here are supporting this move. That's not what I would expect, I would expect people on HN to object to this move on principle. Maybe my prediction in where most HN commenters stand in principle on this issue is wrong, or just maybe, this is a rare example of a time when the principle (hardware should be free to run at their max capability, not deliberat…

> It's honestly pretty surprising to me to see how many people on here are supporting this move. That's not what I would expect, I would expect people on HN to object to this move on principle.

Sounds like free speech. People were all for unrestricted free speech... until the right wing started using it.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#218
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because it's just not their business. They don't need to confuse their objectives with bitcoin to get rich, they're doing exceptionally well without it

Then why is Elon Musk trading Bitcoins? Tesla makes more money trading Bitcoin than selling cars. https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-makes-more-money-trading-...

This is just an uneducated guess but is it possible that Tesla is just a company investing heavily in R&D of cars, and hasn't really begun to run a profit yet alongside some somewhat profitable speculative Bitcoin venture that Elon Musk's somehow put under the same roof?

According to that article if you split out the emission credits as well then they've made around -200% more profit selling Bitcoin and -600% more profit with emission credits than selling cars.

The fact that both are negative should tell you something's gone awry.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#219
post #2

Does this behavior anger anyone else on a deep level? I get that its hard to buy GPUs right now, but this seems like such an attack on general purpose computing. Hardware manufactures already segment features between consumer and busness grade parts that the silicon itself is capable of, such as virtualization, but restricting what algorithms one can run is a whole new level. I am pretty sure my next GPU is going to…

> I am pretty sure my next GPU is going to be AMD due to this behavior by Nvidia. I was thinking about buying NVIDIA for the next GPU based on performance numbers alone. However, against it there's: 1) Terrible Linux support(and history). This is specially important now that most of Steam's library runs on Linux without issues. It was eye-opening to see Cyberpunk running almost perfectly on DAY ONE with the same perf…

1) I have NVidia RTX 2060 in my Linux laptop (Lenovo Legion) and NVidia RTX 3070 in my Linux Ryzen desktop.

Previously had 1060 in Intel Linux desktop.

Zero issues.

Re: Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

#220
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because it's just not their business. They don't need to confuse their objectives with bitcoin to get rich, they're doing exceptionally well without it

Then why is Elon Musk trading Bitcoins? Tesla makes more money trading Bitcoin than selling cars. https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-makes-more-money-trading-...

Tesla and Nvidia are entirely different from each other. Tesla's business model has been built on government subsidies, while Nvidia's business model is to sell product. One needs to create profit somehow, and the other is able to alienate one segment of purchasers in preference of another.
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