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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

#631

Post by lazide »

selectodude wrote: post #626
lazide wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any data on that ‘majority of people buy from scalpers’ claim? One reason for anti price gouging laws is that it is not uncommon for people to buy out all supply, then turn around and charge more/sit on a stockpile to solve the artificially created shortage they themselves created - a term for that being ‘cornering the market’. I haven’t generally seen too much anger at someone legitimately opening up sup…

There’s no shortage of people who tried to pull that and ended up with tens of thousands of dollars worth of toilet paper and hand sanitizer last year. If there’s not an actual shortage, merely a demand shock, trying to corner a market will not go well for you.

And many more that made millions. The ones that get caught get penalized in public/shamed, but there are many more that were not - I personally saw many amazon sellers doing it for months without any apparently penalty.

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

#632

Post by hellbannedguy »

pfisch wrote: post #623
Clewza313 wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So at around $2500 a pop, you'd be looking at a year just to amortize your costs, and that's assuming BTC stays at its current insane levels. (A mighty assumption, since it's dropped 30% in the last week.)

2080ti's don't cost $2500. ???

Used on Amazon is $2099.00

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

#633

Post by Clewza313 »

pfisch wrote: post #623
Clewza313 wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So at around $2500 a pop, you'd be looking at a year just to amortize your costs, and that's assuming BTC stays at its current insane levels. (A mighty assumption, since it's dropped 30% in the last week.)

2080ti's don't cost $2500. ???

Oh yes they do: https://www.newegg.com/p/pl?d=2080ti

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

#634

Post by bastawhiz »

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…

> 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.

That's a weird hill to die on, since they're explicitly marketing and selling these cards with "LHR" branding and NOT discontinuing other non-LHR product lines. These are cards specifically for folks who don't use the features which are throttled.

If they were doing this across the board, that's one thing. But they're not. If it means lower costs or increased availability for consumers who want them, that's a win.

Moreover, they're not disabling anything, they're throttling. One or two GPUs are hardly going to mint you a fortune in ETH in the first place. The difference in hash rates is not affecting anyone who meaningfully cares about general purpose computing. Nobody is switching their industrial mining rig over to play Dota. They've throttled an extremely niche use case which makes the cards more broadly available to the public instead of a very specific single-purpose industry: that hardly seems like an attack on general purpose computing.

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

#635

Post by scoopertrooper »

kbenson wrote: post #602
scoopertrooper wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. S…

> 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. That is by no means the accepted definition, nor an apt description. I know people that bought two PS3's when they came out in 2006, one to play, one to sell. That is generally accepted as "scalping",…

> These are "scalpers" in every single single sense of the word, and the only difference between them and someone that makes a business out of it is scale.

You're right they are scalpers; they are buying more than needed with the hope of making a quick buck.

However, like most things it's a matter of degree. Your friends were acting in the wrong and in the aggregate they did harm the market, but the people doing it professionally cause the most harm individually and hence tend to raise the most ire.

> Scalpers are just brokers that work in a different product. They make money by arbitrage, where the primary sales market is underselling a good compared to the secondary sales market.

They create scarcity in the primary market, which forces people into the secondary market. If scalpers did not exist, then the same number of people would get tickets, but there would be a greater welfare gain for consumers.

> And lest you think it's easy to just point at scalpers/brokers and at all the money they make because they're selling a $50 ticket for $200, consider that those are the extreme cases, and relatively few tickets go for that. There's also many tickets that go under cost.

They may be taking some risk in their venture, but they're still not providing any value. They are needless middlemen in a market that already sells direct to consumers. Also the cases are not that 'extreme', ask anyone trying to buy a graphics card right now, gasoline a week ago, or toilet paper when Covid-19 was starting up.

> Who do you think ended up paying for that? Where do you think the funds came from to pay for that? (here's a hint, you need to make an occasional 200%-300% profit in that business to break even over the long run in a lot of cases)

Presumably they are claiming a bigger share of the welfare pie than they are giving, else they wouldn't be participating in the market.

> Here's another question, why and how is this different than the stock market, and in the ways it's different, how does it matter to the perspective you're expressing?

The stock market has a social purpose. It provides a means for companies to raise capital to undertake investment. The market system is theorised to be the most efficient means to allocate this capital.

The scalpers don't serve a social purpose, they merely extract welfare from transactions that would have otherwise favoured consumers.

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

#636

Post by Reason077 »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #469
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 t…

> ”Nvidia has no incentive to make sure the GPU market operates in a sustainable way by supporting a secondary market.”

They do in the sense that buyers often consider future resale values when making primary purchase decisions. It’s much easier to justify purchasing a $2500 “enthusiast” graphics card if you’re confident you can get a decent chunk of that back when you sell it in 6-12 months.

Similarly, car makers are incentivised to try to ensure their vehicles have decent resale value. Expected future residuals affect financing and purchase decisions today.

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

#638

Post by arsome »

nitrogen wrote: post #316
ALittleLight wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Freedom is only good until an incentive aligns that causes harm to the long-term stability of an industry or society. Right now, people who want to create value cannot do so because a paperclip maximizer has found a way to exploit the system for its own gain. Nvidia's move, futile as it may be, aims to maintain the stability of the GPU market for professionals and consumers, the actual value producers of society. Cry…

The economist in me can't help but state the obvious: If those other industries were doing something so much more valuable, they'd aurely be willing to pay just as much for GPUs.

Of course, it's not really the big value-producing activities getting hit here, it's gaming.

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

#639

Post by esyir »

onethought wrote: post #498
istorical wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are the exception of all exceptions. What percentage of GPUs being purchased for the purposes of crypto are for reasons like yours vs being bought by already wealthy conglomerates and mining groups to further enrich the new crypto multi-millionaire/billionaire class.

Aren’t wealthy just buying giant TH asic machines? The gpus are good exactly because they are efficient but if you didn’t care about power consumption, ASICS are more profitable (in terms of cost of setup vs return from mining). The primary reason I went with gpus, is because I can shut them off based on solar excess in 100w increments. So if I’m 200w in excess, turn 2 cards on. 300w - 3 cards etc.

They're not. Asics are more a function of the coin being mined. Namely, if asics are out and competitive, they generally replace gpus altogether as they're both more powerful and efficient. See btc, where gpu mining is completely worthless. Eth on the other hand has no notable asic out AFAIK, and requires gpu mining. Eth miners, regardless of scale, thus require gpus.

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

#640

Post by esyir »

drexlspivey wrote: post #92
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…

> increasing the consumption of energy which is at the core of the problem. How is consuming energy a problem? There is a blob of infinite energy on the sky and practically all of it is wasted.

Oversimplifications like this are a fantastic way to avoid the core issues. Harvesting said ball of energy isn't free. Solar tech and near future power infra is certainly not at the maturity level for this, especially when the consumer is a power and semiconductor black hole of demand.
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