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

Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

bleepingcomputer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 818 posts

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

#271

Post by chrisan »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #168
slownews45 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm thrilled by this. This has been a common approach in I think almost every industry. What nvidia is doing is recognizing that the needs of existing long time consumers / clients / partners are not being met by the current situation. Yes, it inflates short term profits and increases their pricing power, but long run if you can't buy nvidia for your dev box, your game box etc, this reduces the long run nvidia ecosys…

I suppose the "long term customers" for these GPUs are gamers, right? Don't they also come and go? I don't particularly follow this as I'm not really into games, but it seems to me that AMD has had quite an impressive growth recently. Does that mainly come from people new to the market? I'm actually a "new to the market" buyer, and I bought an AMD mostly because I'm mainly a Linux user and didn't want to take any cha…

> Don't they also come and go?

Myself and most of my gaming friends have been buying nvidia cards for (soon to be) decades now.

Basically since 3dfx went belly up

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

#272

Post by _vertigo »

aeternum wrote: post #253
_vertigo wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How do you feel about laser printers and color photocopiers refusing to photocopy government currency?

What, you mean because they are legally obligated to refuse to do so?

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

#273

Post by savant_penguin »

Justsignedup wrote: post #254
slownews45 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm thrilled by this. This has been a common approach in I think almost every industry. What nvidia is doing is recognizing that the needs of existing long time consumers / clients / partners are not being met by the current situation. Yes, it inflates short term profits and increases their pricing power, but long run if you can't buy nvidia for your dev box, your game box etc, this reduces the long run nvidia ecosys…

To add on: none of it is malicious. its just the market stabalization problem a) let's keep consumer grade stuff stable in price b) let's charge miners 3x, because they willing to pay 3x, and destroy the scalping market which is VERY anti everything. Scalpers hurt literally everyone. c) let's not de-stabalize nvidia's income again when eth drops in value. They don't want to be beholden to a coin's gamble either. Basi…

Except that miners will simply workaround the downgrade software (as they did in the past) and regular consumers will be the only ones with crippled hardware

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

#274

Post by ALittleLight »

istorical wrote: post #255
ALittleLight wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their intent is to limit what people can do with their hardware. That strikes me as almost morally wrong. I tell the computer what to do. It doesn't tell me what to do. I think cryptocurrency is a scam and I'll be glad if/when it goes away and graphics cards become cheap again. However, I will never support hardware manufacturers infringing on the idea of general purpose computing for the sake of their business model…

If it suddenly became wildly profitable to buy all of the bread and rice and any form of carbohydrate from food manufacturers and grocery stores and burn it in a field, would it still be morally wrong for food producers to figure out a way to cripple the utility of their food products by making them unburnable? Is there some capitalist principle or moral principle of the free market that overrides all other human nee…

If the choice was between restricting food - i.e making it less profitable to burn, to make it more available to the hungry and letting food be free and the hungry starve, then that's a pick between the best of two bad options. Clearly it's better to feed people than let food be unrestricted.

In this case though the choice is between restricting hardware to give gamers more affordable GPUs. The benefit doesn't match the cost.

The principle is something like freedom or ownership. Arbitrary restrictions are bad because freedom is good. By definition arbitrary restrictions aren't needed (arbitrary) and reduce freedom (restriction).

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

#275

Post by formerly_proven »

_vertigo wrote: post #174
pavel_lishin wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's hard to take the principled approach when you see that the result of sticking to principles results in large organizations enriching themselves while ignoring the myriad externalities. At least, it makes you re-evaluate your principles.

What, externalities like energy waste? If that's the case, why target ETH, isn't ETH going to Proof of Stake soon?[1] I admit I don't really know if what Nvidia is targeting applies to both pre-merge and post-merge ETH [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27194586

> isn't ETH going to Proof of Stake soon?

Ethereum is going proof of stake soon for a few years now.

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

#276

Post by SXX »

Vespasian wrote: post #242
gameswithgo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really isn't a load of crock. For whatever reason NVIDIA has a real interest in making gamers happy. You hear this as being a serious motivation for them even from employees not on the record. The most cynical take on it would be that they want to do this for long term growth. Which if so, is fine. An example of capitalism working.

Either proof-of-stake or ASICs are gonna make GPU Ether mining rather short lived. Nvidia fears that all those customers will vanish over night.

They only fears that those consumers gonna sell their used hardware which gonna cause drop demand for GPU for a long time.

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

#277

Post by pjc50 »

akersten wrote: post #181
_vertigo wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 been a shift I've noticed over the last ~15(?) years of browsing these and similar forums - as they become more well-known and frequented by the general public, the opinions start to lose nuance and aren't as tightly coupled to the principles from which the forum was borne. Similar example - government regulation of tech: if, 15 years ago, you were to tell a community of Hackers that the EU was planning a massiv…

Or perhaps those of us who've been here since Fidonet are weary of nuance-free libertarianism. Shrug

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

#278

Post by istorical »

onethought wrote: post #131
shagie wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if you're only mining with renewables? The issue isn't the "we're using renewable energy - see, this doesn't make things worse." It also doesn't make things better. Whats more, its increasing the consumption of energy which is at the core of the problem. It would have been even better to push that renewable energy out onto the grid (and also not increase the consumption of power for crypto mining). Switching a…

I mine on renewables and with 3000 series gpus. I didn’t want to do any of this, I ended up here because my energy retailer decided to tax me for exporting too much energy to the grid. So short of earthing the electricity, my solution was to burn it up in mining, and improve my solar roi. The 3000 series gpus are the most efficient hashes/watt. So actually by disabling this, you are driving people towards less effici…

You are the exception of all exceptions. What percentage of GPUs being purchased for the purposes of crypto are for reasons like yours vs being bought by already wealthy conglomerates and mining groups to further enrich the new crypto multi-millionaire/billionaire class.

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

#279

Post by amelius »

slownews45 wrote: post #103
wbraun wrote: 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'm thrilled by this. This has been a common approach in I think almost every industry. What nvidia is doing is recognizing that the needs of existing long time consumers / clients / partners are not being met by the current situation. Yes, it inflates short term profits and increases their pricing power, but long run if you can't buy nvidia for your dev box, your game box etc, this reduces the long run nvidia ecosys…

Meanwhile, Nvidia doesn't allow you to use your graphics card in a datacenter/machine learning setup. You need a special license for that.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-updates-ge...

So let's not pretend that Nvidia is acting in the interest of their clients at all times.

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

#280

Post by jp_sc »

wbraun wrote: 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 does, but that the fact that the ponzy scheme that is cryptocurrency hasn't been made illegal by now should angers me even more.
Post reply on HN