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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

#461

Post by matwood »

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.

The scalpers are there because the supply of cards is too low. There is a global supply crunch for pretty much everything right now, but Nvidia also doesn’t want to build out supply for something (mining) which they consider a short term issue.

Increasing supply is the way to get rid of scalpers.

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

#462

Post by fastball »

shagie wrote: post #443
fastball wrote: post #309

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.

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 c…

Hm, no, not really.

Energy production is not zero-sum with some fixed amount of non-renewables.

If I install solar on my house, I'm not forcing anyone else to use non-renewables. If I then use that solar to mine crypto, I'm... still not forcing anyone to use more non-renewables.

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

#463

Post by munk-a »

humaniania wrote: post #447
longhairedhippy wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Eeeeeh, I give a lot less credence to that then I did when I was in college - back then it seemed like everyone was pirating everything (because, facts) but now a days a major consumer for video games is the millennials that have passed the cash vs. free time tipping point of piracy being attractive.

Also, reasonably priced services now exist - I used pandora when I was in college and enjoyed it even with how hamstrung and limited it was - now I use spotify and like... why even bother pirating music now?

Sure occasionally pirating a big title from Ubisoft out of spite alone is pretty attractive but I mostly just nab things off Steam and leave it at that.

Nintendo's anti-piracy efforts are so incredibly misguided - the hardware is the majority cost expenditure for most users and you've already collected that cost so why not try and make your platform not annoying. Allow people to mod games and run indy titles if they so desire. Most of this anti-piracy stuff is just lowering the value to the end consumer anyways.

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

#464

Post by Qwertious »

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…

It's a matter of loyalty - miners have zero loyalty and will always buy whatever their spreadsheet says is cheapest.

In contrast, gamers tend to stick with brands, and if they're forced to switch due to lack of supply, their loyalty (and therefore future bias toward you company) might switch with it.

So while miners may be willing to pay more money per card today, they're not worth the future loss of revenue.

Like you said, you don't buy Nvidia because you're concerned about Nvidia support. If Nvidia was the only option, you would likely decide "fuck it", deal with any Nvidia problems (and become more familiar with running Nvidia) and become less concerned about Nvidia problems in the future because you have more experience dealing with them. And that means AMD may have lost future sales to you.

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

#465

Post by bl0b »

Valmar wrote: post #401
bl0b wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain how you see crypto miners as infringing on other's freedoms? I certainly agree with your first sentence, and think NVIDIA crippling hash rates on their GPUs is the lesser of two evils - just because I think crypto miners are a) wasting massive amounts of electricity and b) messing up prices in the GPU market.

Let's see... crypto-miners hoarding GPUs by the tens, hundreds, even, driving up GPU prices for the non-miner. Also, when the cycle busts, hoards of cheap, abused mining cards flood the second-hand market, making it difficult for companies to sell fresh cards, and also possibly hurting the company's reputation when an abused mined-on GPU fails prematurely. Miners can whine, all they want, but something needs to happe…

Jeez I know all that and support this move by NVIDIA. Fuck the miners for all I care, I thought I said as much in my original post.

I just don't think they're 'infringing on my freedoms' or whatever.

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

#466

Post by paulmd »

acomjean wrote: post #396
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…

I notice Microcenter has limited gpu sales to one per customer per month. Its weird when brick and mortar are like limiting sales, but on the other hand, they want to keep pc builders happy. https://community.microcenter.com/discussion/7334/graphic-ca...

partners and distributors are forcing retailers and etailers to take PSUs and motherboards if they want to get GPUs, frequently very shitty mobos+PSUs that have been stuck in inventory for a long time and they've been having trouble moving. Like, large quantities, 50 A320 motherboards for one GPU type quantities.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxGtMHXWpMw&t=300s

This is one of the reasons that Newegg is doing the Shuffle with those terrible deals - they are passing some of the junk they've been forced to buy along. So now you get a 3 year old watercooling-only mobo and a grenade-tier PSU with your GPU.

This applies to brick and mortar stores too, it's not just about keeping PC builders happy, but if they let one guy walk in and buy every GPU they've got, then they don't get the person coming in to build a PC and buying a motherboard, memory, etc, and they need to move those products because distributors are making them buy them to get GPUs.

The behavior of the AIB partners and distributors is really, really predatory here, they are definitely taking advantage of being the ones in control of a highly desirable commodity.

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

#467

Post by saurik »

zeckalpha wrote: post #455
saurik wrote: 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…

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

I mean vs. traceable crypto. When you mine crypto, it essentially poofs out of nothing into your hand: there is nothing to trace it "from", as it were, on the blockchain, as the electricity you paid for it isn't recorded in that ledger; so, if you want to do something illegal with money, and you need to figure out a way to control some funds that no one can work out "is you", mining crypto is a great way to do it: you pay for electricity in fiat and obtain a fundamentally unrelated pile of crypto.

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

#468

Post by corndoge »

eropple wrote: post #418
dijit wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because, yeah, having ex-miner cards burn out is a pretty common thing on the used market. This is mostly a myth, miners cards are usually undervolted, and only a subset of the card is used. If your CPU only used it's floating point unit then it wouldn't be as intense as if you were using the whole thing. The only potential issue is thermal damage, but that's hard to place and has to be close to, or in excess of 90…

It's not a myth. These things get racked in stacks of GPUs in what may or may not be actually-cooled data centers. Undervolted or not, when you couple that with constant load you're stressing devices manufactured to consumer specs. The excusemaking is pernicious.

None of this disproves GP's claims.

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

#469

Post by actually_a_dog »

akelly wrote: 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…

> 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.

Great commentary on the unsustainability of it all. Nvidia has no incentive to make sure the GPU market operates in a sustainable way by supporting a secondary market. Thus, they have every incentive to cut the legs out from under resellers. It would also be anywhere from hard to nearly impossible to give them an incentive to allow the secondary market to operate in such a way as to increase the sustainability of their product.

Edit: Aren't we a bit touchy today? (Turn showdead on and look a little down thread.)

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

#470

Post by paulmd »

XorNot wrote: post #444
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.

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.

Even worse, consoles aren't having these availability problems. If you buy a console, and you start building a games library, making friends who you play with on a daily basis (and you usually cannot crossplay between consoles and PC due to skill differences between controller/m+kb, sometimes it works with a controller on PC but most of the time it doesn't) then you are now locked into that ecosystem. You aren't buying a NVIDIA 40 series card, you are buying a PS5 Pro. The longer this goes on, the more customers NVIDIA is losing in the long term.

Inventory levels for consoles aren't quite normalized and available but with a stock tracking discord you can have a decent shot at getting a notice, going to a website, and successfully checking out if you hurry. In contrast you have zero shot at GPUs as a human, there are "cook groups" (the same groups that buy up fancy sneakers and scalp them) using backdoor exploits and botnets or networks of proxies embedded in browser addons, and the hardware is literally are gone the second it's up, or even before.

Rather notoriously, one of the cook groups got ahold of the DigitalRiver item IDs for the 3080 before the launch, and they used API requests to poke orders into the backend. So the items sold out before the listing even went up on the website. That is emblematic of the problem, every mechanism is being probed and any backdoor is being used to punch in orders before humans can get them. There are exploits and botnets and proxies being used and everything, hugely organized and sophisticated operations.

Every major retailer and every AIB partner (Zotac, Asus, etc) is heavily botted to the point where you stand no chance unless you pay for a $600/mo sneakerbot.

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