Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nvidia cripples cryptocurrency mining on RTX 3080 and 3070 cards

bleepingcomputer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 818 posts

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

#561

Post by Phlarp »

22c wrote: post #492
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…

I don't think this will help pricing or availability much either. LTT did a video on this topic somewhat recently and it turns out a lot of the reasons that you can't get a card right now is related to chip shortages and people (yes, regular gaming enthusiasts) buying any card they can find. Even cards that already have terrible mining efficiency are scarce.

Unless the miners are cutting off the supply at the silicon production level. What's to stop Antminer (or any other mining asic company) from paying 10x as much for a majority of TSMC capacity, RTX and Ryzen supply be damned.

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

#562

Post by endgame »

navaati wrote: post #301
endgame wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4) Crippling the ability to GPU passthrough (subpoint of (2), I suppose)

To give them credit when it’s due, they recently lifted this limitation.

Too late for me. I bought an AMD GPU last year.

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

#563

Post by scoopertrooper »

kbenson wrote: post #449
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…

> 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 may…

> 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".

That’s a bit of a straw man, literally no one considers that scalping. It’s generally understood to mean buying more of scarce product than you could ever possibly need with the intent to sell it at a massive markup.

Scalpers are parasitic rent seekers in the digital age. They do nothing to improve the logistics or liquidity of markets. They merely seek to monopolise supply to extract profit from consumers for a product they did not produce.

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

#564

Post by paulmd »

throayobviousl wrote: post #541
addicted wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edited to remove incorrect info.

Nvidia literally sells mining cards that do not have outputs https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/ This is all a scheme to stop the used market from ruining their MSRP pricing.

meanwhile, at AMD headquarters...

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-rdna-mining-graphics-c...

AMD isn't even going to limit performance on gaming cards, nor are they using a different node for their mining cards like NVIDIA. They are straight-up just going to shunt wafers over to mining cards, while letting miners have both the mining cards and the gaming cards.

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

#565

Post by Clewza313 »

sawjet wrote: post #553
actually_a_dog wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

What is unsustainable about Bitcoin?

Is there anything sustainable about Bitcoin?

But getting back on topic, Bitcoin miners long since moved to custom ASICs, you can't make a profit with GPUs any more.

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

#566

Post by akelly »

kodt wrote: post #551
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…

Don’t gamers usually frown upon buying cards previously used for mining? It’s like buying a used car that used to be part of a rental fleet. I suppose demand is high enough that people will buy whatever they can get though.

Hard to tell from an ebay listing whether it was used for mining or not.

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

#567

Post by actually_a_dog »

sawjet wrote: post #553
actually_a_dog wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

What is unsustainable about Bitcoin?

For one thing, it consumes more electricity than the entire country of Norway: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-power-consu...

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

#568

Post by ALittleLight »

stale2002 wrote: post #311
ALittleLight wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you want to help long term customers send discounts to people who have bought cards before. You don't need to cripple the devices.

I don't support companies making the choice to limit their compute. I think companies should sell general purpose computers.

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

#569

Post by koluna »

webinvest wrote: post #491
koluna wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry, spit my coffee over the keyboard. What value does cryptocurrency provide other than sucking the world’s electric energy for meaningless calculations?

I am glad you asked. The value that cryptocurrencies provide boils down to 3 main things: 1) A store of value. 2) A transfer of value. 3) A creation of value. Bitcoin provides a store of value by still letting you buy a pizza with your Bitcoin both now and in the future. It’s price has always been highly volatile but after every 4 year cycle, it has been worth more in every major world currency. Stellar Lumens, Algor…

Value that basically doesn’t exist without real money behind it? That can be used as… well, money without the energy waste?

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

#570

Post by paulmd »

babypuncher wrote: post #314
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…

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.

AMD is actually going into this full-throttle, they are not only starting production of mining cards on the same node as their gaming cards (unlike NVIDIA, where the mining cards are on a different older node that doesn't compete for wafer allocations), but they aren't even limiting mining performance on their gaming cards

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-rdna-mining-graphics-c....

So if they follow through on their "no mining limiters on gaming cards" you can expect miners are going to get both the gaming and the mining cards from AMD, and that the number of wafers going to gaming cards is going to shrink.

(AMD cards already have the best value in terms of hashrate-per-dollar btw, 6700XT and 6800 are good mining cards, comparable to 3060 Ti mining performance for less money)

Post reply on HN