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Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

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451–460 of 818 posts

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

#451
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While having the cards is tablestakes, and newer cards can do more for less, in the end--even for Ethereum--you really still are spending more on electricity than hardware, and so you can have all the cards in the world and still not be able to mine crypto effectively. Most mining is thereby done in other places in the world where the externalities on power generation and use (clean or dirty, both) are less well trac…

With today’s ETH prices, electricity costs are a fraction of the revenue from mining. Like, on the order of less than 10%.

That's brutal... isn't the hash difficulty supposed to automatically increase to compensate? Is it actually the case that the limiting factor on hash rate right now is how quickly Nvidia is willing to sell GPUs?!

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

#452
This whole situation makes me wonder if the GPU market will just crash once the biggest coins move away from PoW?

The market would be flooded with a ton of current and last gen GPUs with second-hand pricing, while AMDs and Nvidias newest offerings suddenly lost a major part of their demand.

I guess another possibility is that miners will just transfer their efforts to coins still working on PoW, trying to make those relevant instead.

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

#453
post #441

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 o…

> Nvidia is trying to get miners to buy mining-only cards

I thought the non-LHR cards are fully featured?

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

#454
This is like buying a 400hp engine in a sports car but it's only available to use 400hp to those that are retired, and anyone else it's just too bad. The problem is not miners, it has been said many times before. The problem is the silicon shortage, and now scalpers and even worse yet, bots.

Nvidia needs to work in fixing the JIT manufacturing process, spending resources on any other issue is not helping. Inventing new nerfed chips in your products to a specific use case is not solving this. They are at risk at also angering a prominent portion of customers since their "alternative" CMP HX line is laughable.

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

#455
post #151
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?

While having the cards is tablestakes, and newer cards can do more for less, in the end--even for Ethereum--you really still are spending more on electricity than hardware, and so you can have all the cards in the world and still not be able to mine crypto effectively. Most mining is thereby done in other places in the world where the externalities on power generation and use (clean or dirty, both) are less well trac…

What do you mean untraceable crypto? Isn’t there a distributed ledger of transactions?

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

#456
post #441

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 o…

> Nvidia is trying to get miners to buy mining-only cards I thought the non-LHR cards are fully featured?

They have a SKU specifically targeting miners

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/

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

#457
I said it before and I'll say it again - the vendors are the criminals here. There are vital industries that need GPUs for their viability - video games, medical research, engineering etc. and they should filter out the robo buyers to allow these people to purchase the graphic cards at reasonable rates. Right not RX570s are going for $200 on ebay right now... A 4 year old mid-tier graphics card....

Just allocating some GPUs to a wait list would be enough.

For people like me who cannot wait for GPU to become available you can get a very cheap usb-hdmi dongle off of amazon for dual monitor support. It works well enough for what I need it to do.

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

#458

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…

You missed the (extremely good) point that istorical is making.

The argument in this subthread has been over whether we should be mad at Nvidia on principle. For example, as capableweb puts it:

> What worth is a principle if you don't still have it when it get challenged? Then it's just a opinion, which is fine by itself and it's ok to change opinion, smart people do it all the time. But don't call it a principle.

You seemingly agreed with a "principled" reading of the situation: "That strikes me as almost morally wrong. I tell the computer what to do. It doesn't tell me what to do."

istorical is arguing, by giving an extreme case, that we don't have a consistent principle against limiting the capabilities of a product when it will benefit a customer who matters more.

After all, if we've agreed that it's morally wrong to "cripple" a product, then what worth is that principle if we abandon it during a crisis? Let the people starve! You're rightly repulsed by that idea, and so you're retreating to the position that we're just going with a cost/benefit analysis. Preventing food from being burned has a cost and a benefit. Preventing GPUs from being used for crypto has a cost and a benefit.

The thing is, this gives up the supposed moral high ground that many in this thread have tried to promote as a reason to be mad at Nvidia. From the perspective you present, it's perfectly reasonable to look at the situation and say that preventing GPUs from being used for crypto will have more benefit than cost. (I certainly think so!) There's no inconsistency you can draw out of someone weighing the various benefits and costs differently than you do.

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

#459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Aren't most miners in China and use coal power? Seems like it is contributing to destroying the planet then.

Yes, but you'll note that this is an argument I never made.

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

#460
post #280
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.

That's inaccurate, a core feature of Ponzi schemes is that they require fraudulent activity, where someone is lying to participants about how much money is "theirs" and the way in which it grows.

Cryptocurrencies don't do that, the system isn't lying to you about how many whatevercoins you own.

Pyramid-scheme? Maybe. Pump-and-dump? Happens sometimes. Hugely speculative asset? Definitely.

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