Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards • Hacker News Board

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

#471

Post by asddubs » Tue, May 18, 2021, 11:37 PM UTC

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…

c.2) let's produce huge amount of e-waste once coins drop again

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

#472

Post by californical » Tue, May 18, 2021, 11:38 PM UTC

gpanders wrote: post #395

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…

> 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. If you need to run millions of hashes per second then buy one of the non-LHR models. No one is forcing you to buy one of these chips and Nvidia is not taking anything away from you. This is like saying that Intel limits what people can do with their…

This is different than just product segmentation or binning chips - this is hardware restricting software.

How would you feel towards Intel if they didn’t allow you to run Microsoft Office on an i3 chip because it’s a “consumer grade processor” - you have to upgrade to an i5 or higher to run “business programs”.

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

#473

Post by saurik » Tue, May 18, 2021, 11:39 PM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #429

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…

Ethash is actually more profitable when underclocking and power limiting the card for max efficiency. With cheap electricity around $0.10/kWh this can mean $0.30 a day on $7 in profit. a 3070 with an average 60 Mh/s: https://whattomine.com/coins/151-eth-ethash?hr=60&p=120&fee=...

Ok, so now I am dying to understand how this could possibly be the case, as this isn't how the economics are supposed to work... like, according to this calculator, I could make $5 with the old graphics cards in my PC, and I live in California (where I would expect expensive power).

Like, the premise is supposed to be that if there is that much profit to be made mining, people will mine, the hash rate will skyrocket, the block production time will get too low, and the hash difficulty will rise until the profit you can make is low enough that you aren't sure if you want to do it anymore. Does the difficultly just not rise fast enough?

Or like, is this largely just because the price of Ethereum has gone up "too quickly" in the past month? If so, does this calculator take into account the incentive factor that if people actually do this the difficulty will go up, and so this $7 of profit today might be $0.50 of profit in a month, and maybe you will fail to pay off your hardware investment fast enough?

Or is there just something really weird going on in this market that I don't understand (and would love love love to learn about)... maybe it literally is just as simple as "there aren't enough graphics cards to go around, and Nvidia's disinterest in making profit in this way--even temporarily--is the strongest current limit on hashrate"?

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

#474

Post by heavyset_go » Tue, May 18, 2021, 11:39 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #175

warent wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because it's just not their business. They don't need to confuse their objectives with bitcoin to get rich, they're doing exceptionally well without it

Then why is Elon Musk trading Bitcoins? Tesla makes more money trading Bitcoin than selling cars. https://www.wsj.com/articles/tesla-makes-more-money-trading-...

Tesla's Q1 operating profit of $594M was slightly less than the sum of their $101M Bitcoin profit and the $518M regulatory credits they received[1].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/n0jxyt/tes...

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

#475

Post by brianobush » Tue, May 18, 2021, 11:39 PM UTC

They are limiting mining of a single coin: Ethereum. Nothing is going to stop mining other coins, which are quite profitable. Also, Ethereum is going through two upcoming events which will change the landscape dramatically. July has EIP-1559 which will reduce ETH mining earnings by 30% and the eventual move to proof of stake in late 2021/early 2022. Both of these events will make other non-ETH coins more profitable.

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

#476

Post by zucker42 » Tue, May 18, 2021, 11:40 PM UTC

bentcorner wrote: post #261

NazakiAid wrote: post #56

A major bad point with this is when the mining cards become obsolete, they won't be able to be used as a graphics card in a computer due to it not being able to output to a display. So realistically it will decrease avaliable graphic card supply to gamers in the future who are maybe looking for a cheap used graphics card (therefore pushing people to buy a new card instead). Short term fix, long term problem. I was th…

How big is the used market for graphics cards though? Common advice is to avoid buying used unless you also price in the risk that the card was used as a miner and hasn't been taken care of. Aside from the recent drought of GPUs and pricing madness, you could buy low-end current-gen cards that could outperform higher-end previous-gen parts.

The used market is huge. Even before the shortage, newer used GPUs were selling for 75% or more of their new price, from my memory.

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

#477

Post by matheusmoreira » Tue, May 18, 2021, 11:42 PM UTC

smoldesu wrote: post #397

savant_penguin wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

Hardware fuse? Trying to run custom software can actually brick hardware now?

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

#478

Post by paulmd » Tue, May 18, 2021, 11:42 PM UTC

akersten wrote: post #123

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…

If this works (spoiler: it won't, it will be cracked within a month), it will create more e-Waste as miners will toss their no-video-output-mining-only cards after they're no longer the latest tech, instead of being able to resell them to gamers, thinning the used graphics card market, forcing more gamers to buy new from nVidia instead of rebuying old cards online. That makes me angry, it should make you angry too.

there's no such thing as a "mining-only" card, they are still good for compute tasks like grid compute.

what you are looking at is a future that is very, very bright for BOINC and folding@home scores.

the cards will never be worthless, if nothing else someone will buy them up for 25 bucks and store them until the (inevitable) next mining crisis, and any reasonable miner is going to chose 25 bucks versus having to pay to dispose of them properly (ahahah, sorry, we all know if it comes to that they're going in the nearest creek).

anyway you get the point though, the value is never going to actual zero, people will buy them for development work, for grid compute, or just as a bet on the next mining crisis. A hundred bucks for a card is better than nothing.

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

#479

Post by munk-a » Tue, May 18, 2021, 11:42 PM UTC

knz_ wrote: post #347

munk-a wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how you think that if GPUs were cheaper then miners would be buying less of them. Miners are a black hole for computing power - they can absorb near infinite amounts of processors since they know (or strongly believe at least) that they'll pay for themselves pretty quickly. I think Nvidia has some problems and their chips should be cheaper - but if that were the case then this solution (splitting the mar…

> I don't know how you think that if GPUs were cheaper then miners would be buying less of them. It would increase supply by forcing fabs to scale (would take years anyway, but should happen sooner rather than later). > Miners are a black hole for computing power - they can absorb near infinite amounts of processors since they know (or strongly believe at least) that they'll pay for themselves pretty quickly. And tha…

The fabs did scale down near the beginning of COVID-19 AFAIK when the economy was in a panic and all sorts of manufacturers were canceling orders from people further up the chain - and that does account for some of the shortage we're seeing now (since that production time was resold to other consumers) but it's a much smaller impact than the 30XX line's attractiveness to miners. I don't think there is honestly the capacity to meet these levels of demand right now (as opposed to there being readily available production capacity that's either idle or doing something that could be outbid).

I also don't really see how keeping all of the consumer groups (miners and regular folks) using precisely the same model of card instead of two incredibly unbelieveably similar cards would actually increase demand. If anything there being a card optimized for hashing (i.e. with unnecessary bits stripped off) might lower the cost to produce such a card and allow miners to actually purchase more of the card compared to paying for a nearly top of the line consumer video card.

I don't actually know how much we'll see Nvidia try and scale up (since that extra purchased capacity will be a liability if Eth suddenly tanks) but I think their decision to increase scale will only be minorly impacted by this effort. I will admit there will be some impact since they could refuse to increase the 3070 supply (please correct me if I've got model numbers turned around) without having as dramatic an effect on their customer base - however, that'd honestly just return them to square one where the miners are going to pick up consumer grade 3080s to keep up with mining projections.

I think the important thing here is that nothing is being made impossible - it's being made difficult which should have a corresponding effect on the value of these cards to miners unless they screw it up again in a major way. People trying to absolutely prevent video game piracy have either

1. Screwed it up and allowed a sharpie to defeat their system

2. Bricked a whole bunch of legitimate users' computes and ended up in class actions

The successful approach to prevent piracy is to price things fairly and while making it less convenient to pirate things - honestly a huge driver here in the modern world is content that's enriched by being online, not stupid "You must have an internet connection to play this single player game" but "If you're online you can tap in a friend for help" - that sort of online integration significantly lowers the value for pirates while allowing legitimate users to only see upsides.

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

#480

Post by poglet » Tue, May 18, 2021, 11:42 PM UTC

lacker wrote: post #358

Corazoor wrote: post #324

I find the argument for this move unconvincing: Nvidias failure to meet demand is somehow the fault of... the customers? But since there are morally aprehensible workloads, it is totally fine to... throttle them? Not prevent or contractually prohibit, as one might expect... And of course it is Nvidia who decicdes on the morals of your workload. I mean, seriously, how can anyone be ok with that?

how can anyone be ok with that? I don't want to mine cryptocurrency on my graphics card. So given the choice of buying an unrestricted one off ebay for $2500, or a restricted one for the originally suggested price of $800, I would rather buy the restricted one. Nvidia isn't being dishonest, they aren't throttling the cards they already sold, they aren't claiming anything is moral or immoral, they are just offering a…

I would like that too but it doesn't seem to be the case with the 'restricted' RTX 3060 (I would like to get it at RRP).