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Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

bleepingcomputer.com

311–320 of 818 posts

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

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their intent is to limit what people can do with their hardware. Not really. The intent is to get graphics cards in the hands of gamers and professionals, instead of in the hands of crypto miners. That is the end goal here. If you have a better solution, of how to do this without people getting around it via reselling, ect , please suggest it.

My solution is not to do that. Make and sell the cards to the people who will buy them. If you're selling out make more and/or raise prices.

> If you're selling out make more and/or raise prices.

What if you want to raise prices only to crypto miners, and not raise them for gamers/professions, in order to support your long term customers?

There are lots of very good business reasons to provide preferential treatment to a specific customer base, and to raise prices on a different customer base.

It is called price discrimination, and is very useful.

Do you not support companies making obvious business decisions like this, with their own company, that have large benefits to their existing customer base, as well as being perfectly rational from a business perspective?

Having crypto miners subsidize an existing customer base, makes a lot of business sense, and helps out a lot of people.

And it is all done, with people making voluntary decisions with the products that they choose to sell. Don't buy the product, if you don't like it.

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

#312
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…

I guess the issue is, let's say you're doing something in CUDA, and the program uses $FOO, something commonly used by miners. Never mind that you're not mining any kind of cryptocurrency, the card or driver will decide that because you did $FOO, you're mining and gimp your work, or, let's say that they doubled down further, shut it down completely.

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

#313
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 all for it. My system with a 3080 had a hardware issue so I needed to swap it for a new one. It took me weeks of shenanigans with the vendor because they couldn't get a new card to send me a new system. And that was after a month's wait to get the original system, also due to supply constraints. I have actual work to do, and am fine with NVidia making it harder for make-money-fast potlatchers if that means I can actually buy their product to do useful work.

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

#314
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…

You say that, but but you might change your tune if 4 months from now you can easily buy an Nvidia card because miners stopped buying them while AMD cards are still scarce.

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

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm personally angry that this whole crypto ponzi scheme has gotten so big. That miners are producing e-Waste is the least of its environmental impact.

Keep being angry. It will be much larger in future, and use magnitudes more energy. Either make peace (with the drumbeat of human progression), or spend your days being angry at something you don’t understand. Your choice!

[deleted]

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

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Freedom is only good until an incentive aligns that causes harm to the long-term stability of an industry or society. Right now, people who want to create value cannot do so because a paperclip maximizer has found a way to exploit the system for its own gain. Nvidia's move, futile as it may be, aims to maintain the stability of the GPU market for professionals and consumers, the actual value producers of society. Crypto mining does not produce true value commensurate to the burden it is currently placing on all other industries that use computing power.

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

#317

Like I said for electricity, aren't you free to do with your GPU whatever you want?! This is anti-consumer they should be sued. Just like ISPs wanted to slow your traffic for services they don't like and didn't succeed hardware producers can not limit what you do with your purchased hardware.

Other people doing research etc. need GPUs. If rich people started to hoard all food or ffp masks, shops would intervene first (they did during the hoarding last year) and the government would follow if that wouldn't help.

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

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm personally angry that this whole crypto ponzi scheme has gotten so big. That miners are producing e-Waste is the least of its environmental impact.

Not to mention the massive amount of electrical power consumed to perform the calculations.

You aren't joking!

From March 2018:

Today, a half-megawatt mine, Miehe says, “is nothing.” The commercial miners now pouring into the valley are building sites with tens of thousands of servers and electrical loads of as much as 30 megawatts, or enough to power a neighborhood of 13,000 homes. And in the arms race that cryptocurrency mining has become, even these operations will soon be considered small-scale.

For people clamoring for renewable energy, this is an obscene amount of energy needed to do a single task - mine bitcoin. Which should make it even more obscene that all of that energy is being used for what? The benefit of a few people. Staggering to think how common this is and the article even states a 30 megawatt system is small compared to some of the other sites that are out there.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-m...

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

#319

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…

Gaming demand is fairly constant, while mining demand ebbs and flows with the value of cryptos. Last time this peaked was in early 2018.

Nvidia knows their loyal, regular customers are PC gamers, so it's in their best interest to make sure these customers get the best buying experience to ensure they stay repeat customers.

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

#320

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…

c) is nonsense. There are no downsides to a temporary boost in Nvidia's profits, even if it means profits eventually falling back to normal levels when ETH drops in value. Also, LHR (gaming) GPUs and CMP (mining) GPUs share the exact same supply chain and components. When/if crypto demand suddenly drops, Nvidia will still have to deal with the oversupply of components. Having segmented the market between LHR and CMP GPUs does not in any way make it easier for Nvidia to forecast overall production capacity.
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