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Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

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

#441

Post by akelly »

This won't really do anything for availability or reducing scalper pricing. Miners are a sizeable proportion of sales but far from the majority. Gamers will be able to buy more of these GPUs but less of the non-LHR or AMD GPU's. GPU prices won't actually change.

The real reason Nvidia is doing this is that when mining profitability inevitably drops, either because of a crypto price crash or Ethereum moving to Proof of Stake, the miners will flood the used market and ruin Nvidia's profits for a few quarters. Nvidia is trying to get miners to buy mining-only cards, because those can't be sold to gamers down the line. They'd rather mining cards become e-waste in a few years than get resold.

People think Nvidia is doing this to try to help them get better prices now, but really Nvidia is trying to extract more money from gamers in the long term.

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

#442

Post by [deleted] »

shados wrote: post #424
ajmurmann wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't scalpers only there because the product is clearly underpriced? Why not increase prices till the scalpers are gone or simply auction the GPUs off? That's clearly what the market is pointing at.

Normally I'd agree (eg: I think limited concert tickets should simply be auctioned off). This is a little trickier. You have a consumer grade product aimed at a mass market segment (gamers) being used as a glorified financial market device (crypto). You could just sell it at whatever price people are willing to pay for (crypto) and make a big buck. You'd likely wreck the gaming industry in the process. If you feel th…

[deleted]

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

#443

Post by shagie »

fastball wrote: post #309
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…

It's not anyone's responsibility to make things "better" for you or anyone else. The person I was replying to said that mining was destroying the planet. This doesn't seem particularly true to me if you're mining on renewables.

If one's motivation for using green energy is to make the environment not go to crap as fast, then using green energy to mine crypto doesn't help anything and the use of green energy is nothing but a fig leaf.

If one wants to mine crypto, then do it as cheaply as possible instead. It really doesn't matter what the source of energy is. The entire system of crypto mining is inherently about who can use the energy the cheapest. Whats more, if someone gets energy cheaper it forces others to consume more power too.

If crypto is mined, it really doesn't matter what it uses power it - mining crypto is still increased consumption of power. Someone else is going to have to use non-green energy to do whatever they're going to do.

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

#444

Post by XorNot »

ajmurmann wrote: post #403
Justsignedup wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Aren't scalpers only there because the product is clearly underpriced? Why not increase prices till the scalpers are gone or simply auction the GPUs off? That's clearly what the market is pointing at.

That's not the point: the point is that Nvidia want to still have regular customers who, when they think "I need a gaming rig" think "Nvidia".

If Nvidia becomes "GPUs are cryptominers", then once demand dries up, their marketshare is zilch, and no one's writing games optimized for Nvidia cards anymore, and there's a big pile of bugs they've not fixed with new games trying to use Nvidia cards.

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

#445

Post by rsj_hn »

ajmurmann wrote: post #403
Justsignedup wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Aren't scalpers only there because the product is clearly underpriced? Why not increase prices till the scalpers are gone or simply auction the GPUs off? That's clearly what the market is pointing at.

This is missing half the story. Yes, things can be temporarily underpriced and then an appeal to scalpers makes sense, as scalpers can instantly raise the price to the market clearing rate. But at the same time they can instantly lower the price to the market clearing rate.

What manufacturers and consumers both want is price stability. They want prices to change in regular intervals and in predictable amounts. Both producers and consumers, but much more producers than consumers, need to make long range plans which require stable pricing. So when the iPhone first came out there was huge demand. Why didn't Apple auction the phones off? Because Apple wanted to anchor expectations for what the phone would cost over the long term. They certainly did not want consumers thinking that if they waited the phone would become cheaper. Thus they did not want consumers to think the phone's price was subject to a daily auction. Instead, it's better for Apple to have occasional shortages than to let people think that iPhone pricing will be moving up and down a lot. That allows consumers to make long term plans as well.

So manufacturers want stable pricing, they want happy consumers, and they don't want surprises. Consumers want the same thing. That's why people hate scalpers. You can draw all the supply demand curves you want, but that doesn't change the fact that people need to make long range plans, and this requires stable pricing.

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

#446

Post by smiley1437 »

livre wrote: post #71
smiley1437 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've read, the card detects if it has been continuously mining for 30 minutes then throttles itself.

GP's question was about _how_ it detects it has been mining. Does it have a list of processes or executable names of popular mining software? Does it perform some kind of heuristic and detect if the code it is about to execute corresponds to a hashing algorithm? I don't know the answer, I hope someone can explain it to me and GP.

nVidia has been deliberately vague about exactly what they are detecting because it would make it easy for miners to develop a workaround.

That said, Anandtech wrote about it briefly recently:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16648/nvidia-updates-geforce-...

They surmise that there is hardware-enforcement of BIOS\Drivers via some blown eFuses.

Also they imply that nVidia does multiple checks such as whether it's running on a PCIe x1 bus (gamers would typically use x4 or more) and whether it's hooked up to a monitor. It's likely they check for other things too but they would keep it on the down-low.

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

#447

Post by humaniania »

longhairedhippy wrote: post #407
smoldesu wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvidia is implementing a hardware fuse system (a-la the Nintendo Switch) to prevent firmware manipulation. I can't speak to how secure these new cards will be, but the Tegra was an absolute pain in the ass to work with. It took a year before people even figured out how the firmware was loaded, much less how to interoperate between custom and official ones without blowing a fuse. To this day, approaching half a decade…

I think the big difference here is there is no money behind hacking the Switch, it's an interesting problem to a small(ish) subset of people. There's tons of folks that would make actual hard cash off those hacks which will make them much more invested in finding out how to work around the solution.

No money in video game piracy? What? https://jolt.richmond.edu/2019/02/09/the-unwinnable-war-on-v...

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

#448

Post by zeckalpha »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #387
munk-a wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think it's pretty likely we'll see a work around, but if that work around is a custom made firmware patch (like it was for the driver update they deployed IIRC) then that will probably mean the chips you purchased have a less rosy long term cost as future driver updates won't be applicable to your altered firmware. If it requires any physical tinkering with the chip then it definitely increases the effective…

100% this in the short term, but in the long term workarounds will become harder to find. Have a look at iOS jailbreak history. I just hope they don’t kill functionality which matters for other meaningful purposes, like deep learning.

There’s not money to be earned by jailbreaking iOS that increases in value the harder it is to jailbreak.

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

#449

Post by kbenson »

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…

> Scalpers hurt literally everyone.

Not entirely true, and also not accepting that one person's "scalper" is another person's "bought this but decided I would rather have the money it seems to be worth now that I see how much this is".

Secondary markets provide liquidity, allow for original sellers to trade money for time, provide reputational protection based on societal perceptions (this one is a bit weird, and maybe the less defensible of the reasons. Selling your own inventory on a secondary market to avoid negative press for high prices is thwarting normal market information principles, IMO), etc.

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

#450

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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