I would normally be appalled by such an action, but the supply issues for RTX 30x0 cards are beyond ridiculous. Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation (I say that as someone who has put thousands of dollars into crypto in the past). Why should people who want to try some ML/DL at home (maybe they even need it for a class they're taking), and might also want to play the occasional game, have to pay an arm and a leg to get their (remaining) hands on a modern, efficient card?
I really wish Nvidia would do this across the RTX product line.
Edit: the "Syrian refugee crossing into Europe" trope might pop up as a counter-argument for crypto. I am Syrian and still have relatives there. Refugees' assets are a drop in the ocean of speculators' mining and HODLing.
The environmental issues are concerning to me. The amount of electricity being burned through for what is essentially a skeuomorphism of gold mining, pretty much primarily for speculation now, is beyond belief. It's a completely artificial, and artificially scarce, product.
Whatever original hopeful goals the creator(s) of Bitcoin had with this idea, and decentralised currency...if there was any victory at all it is a pyrrhic one when you look at the externalities.
If you can call a digital gold rush a victory, anyway. The physical one in the US was pretty bad for a lot of people.
That's putting it in the best possible light. Mining gold leaves the world with physical blocks of gold, which has no continuous upkeep cost. "Mining" cryptocurrency leaves the world with an asset that requires continual upkeep (further "mining") in order to maintain that asset. Any significant drop in the network's hashrate opens it up to attacks.
The upkeep cost for Bitcoin is, and by necessity must be, proportional to the value represented by Bitcoin.
But the upkeep cost of protecting the gold is continuous in the same way as bitcoin mining. If you want to own some gold you need to protect it (usually with the state apparatus of violence, which has massive externalities).
In other words, if you just mine a physical gold block, you don't really have an asset without the state's (or your own) continual upkeep that keeps it protected from attacks.
Those same apparatus are also needed to maintain a global internet without which Bitcoin is useless. You can also just bury gold to keep people from finding it, which is one of the reasons it’s maintained value throughout history.
Upkeep of gold doesn't scale at the same rate as Bitcoin. If we suddenly had 1000 tons more gold, we could put it in existing vaults and very little increased cost.
> But the upkeep cost of protecting the gold is continuous in the same way as bitcoin mining.
This completely misses the point, which was one of magnitude:
>> The upkeep cost for Bitcoin is, and by necessity must be, PROPORTIOANAL TO THE VALUE REPRESENTED by Bitcoin.
Also, that upkeep cost is 100.00% to protect the value of existing bitcoin.
C.f., gold:
> If you want to own some gold you need to protect it (usually with the state apparatus of violence, which has massive externalities).
I don't need continuous mining of bitcoin to protect my non-bitcoin stuff.
However, I do need the "state apparatus of violence" to protect my non-gold stuff, including things like my house and my body, and oh yeah, my fucking mining rig!
If all gold disappeared tomorrow, would anything about the "state apparatus of violence" change? No, of course not. That is absurd.
I never understood the "violence" argument against government. In that sense of the word "violence", there is no alternative that does not at some level also come down to the threat of force. The "state apparatus of violence" won't look so bad after you've dismantled the state in favor of something approaching anarcho-capitalism and are then close to Hobbe's state of nature: nasty, british, and short.
>you don't really have an asset without the state's (or your own) continual upkeep that keeps it protected from attacks.
This describes Bitcoin too.
I think it's facially absurd to claim that the existing financial system (including military, police, etc) costs anywhere near what bitcoin does, but even if it does, it's irrelevant because bitcoin doesn't provide the same things. Bitcoin is a virtual bar of gold or piece of currency, not a financial system.
"Of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent — currently worth around $140 billion — appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets, according to the cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis"
"“Even sophisticated investors have been completely incapable of doing any kind of management of private keys,” said Diogo Monica, the co-founder of a start-up called Anchorage, which helps companies handle cryptocurrency security. Mr. Monica started the company in 2017 after helping a hedge fund regain access to one of its Bitcoin wallets."
"“This whole idea of being your own bank — let me put it this way, ‘Do you make your own shoes?’” he said. “The reason we have banks is that we don’t want to deal with all those things that banks do.”
And there's a great PBS spacetime video exclusively covering the creation of heavy elements, and why they no longer think it's solely the result of supernovae [0].
This comment is probably sarcasm, but just in case it was meant seriously, I just want to make it clear that expending the energy of another supernova to create a currency would be, overall, a Bad Thing at this point in time.
Unless you've got some dyson spheres lying around that you're not telling me about, I'm going to politely request that bitcoin advocates not expend more energy than we have in the entire world just so that they can diversify their investment portfolios.
Actually though, I wonder if there's an analogy that could be drawn between the real origin of gold (supernova) and bitcoin (mining a block). Both are created as dense byproducts of a large compression event (bitcoin: transactions; supernova: the rest of the star). ?
There's nothing special about gold, every other heavy element is also a by-product of supernovae. So, the analogy only works on a dully contrived poetic level, unless you also want to compare Bitcoin meaningfully with lead.
>"Any significant drop in the network's hashrate opens it up to attacks."
I was curious about this. What would "significant" be? What is it based on - the number of outstanding blocks? Is this vulnerability mentioned anywhere in the protocol spec?
Did you know that vanilla financial securities also require upkeep? Approximately 0.5% of the value of all financial assets is burned every year (and potentially an order of magnitude more, depending on what asset and packaging you're talking about).
That's a heck of a figure you're not providing a reference or explanation for at all. Or even an explanation of what you mean by financial securities and "burned".
Mutual funds, the most legible way to get an estimate of the holding cost of securities (since they are required to transact at net asset value) routinely charge between 0.2-1% fees, depending on size and asset class.
Clearinghouses, transfer agents, and cash management firms don't work for free, which is the problem that cryptocurrencies explicitly solve; neither do compliance, KYC, fraud, etc., which most cryptocurrency protocols elide altogether.
They also have an entire corpus of regulation surrounding them and coordination overhead that allows sovereign states to compare apples to apples, and ensure that these respective sovereign State's financial systems are not utilized to facilitate patterns of behavior those respective State's citizens define as criminal.
Oh wait.. You don't want that functionality, and you're still using up the energy footprint in the event you are correct. One of these delivers significantly less versatility than the other for the same energy investment.
I agree that the analogy does not extend past the surface look, but that's the point of calling it a skeumorphism: a new thing that tries to perform the function of an old thing, under a facade that mimics the old thing in a shallow way to ease transitioning.
this is correct, I think solidity doesn't even run on a gpu at all
The energy usage of ethereum comes from the proof-of-work DAG, not the solidity execution. You can easily see this by running a (non mining) ethereum node, any decent CPU will churn through the transactions in blocks in a matter of milliseconds (~200 ms per block), not the 13 seconds it takes to generate that block
It's a calculation, but not a useless one done just to simulate gold mining, unlike Bitcoin. Look deeper into what Ethereum actually is, it's not just a cryptocoin, it's also a computing platform.
They’re not really making a point that needs evidence. If you have no idea what Ethereum is, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that you take a quick look at their website before participating in an web forum discussion about it.
This is different than people blithely spouting “it’s not my job to educate you” when asked to give some support for their controversial, unsubstantiated claim.
Since we've gone meta anyways... Why do so few people value simply linking to and quoting directly from primary sources? From random internet comment #37846399, to sms chats, to user stories on a scrum board, and even news articles these days, nobody cares to drop a link to or actually quote the thing they're referring to. Docs, articles, code, journals...
Yes, it's work to back up your claims with direct links to a source. But maybe that's a reasonable minimum bar to hurdle to stand behind ones statements.
I am not the first one who made a claim in this thread - your reply would be better placed under that comment talking about gold. Surely opening the homepage is reasonable minimum before posting a negative comment.
I’m firmly of the belief that Bitcoin (and it’s ilk) should be illegal. There’s many reasons for it - Sometimes because it’s an unregistered security, sometimes because it falls afoul of laws against paying people in scrip, sometimes because it’s outright fraud.
There’s real uses for Merkel trees in finance - Cryptographically secure history is valuable. I’ve yet to see any problems that blockchains solve that merkel trees do not[1]. Finance and interchange works just fine with just Git - Interchange done via simple published balancesheets with countersignatures by both parties, then merged into “head” on the regular by any form of rollup. It doesn’t have the (well overstated) pseudonymity advantages of bitcoin, and that’s a feature in a well regulated financial market.
[1] With one ridiculous exception: In Iain Bank’s “Excession”, a mothballed war-fleet is resurrected by a traitor who presents enough cryptographic signatures of coconspirators to burn the keys of the real C+C chain. Blockchain would make this much harder - But not necessarily enough harder, even if they had to effectively recreate the military history of an entire total-peace (through superior firepower) civilization.
Modern day California, and by extension Silicon Valley, would not look the way it is today without the California Gold Rush [1], as horrible as its externalities were.
Great prosperity often comes at, or with, a great cost. California today doesn't make a great picture when you look at the homelessness and inequality, and the exorbitant cost of living anywhere near where the action is.
Electricity usage will forever be a human need and people need to realize and accept that. Taking down bitcoin because it's software that runs on computers that uses electricity is not the answer here - renewable and sustainable energy is the answer.
Everybody is just echoing the same headline they read on some news article about bitcoin using a lot of energy without thinking it through properly.
I think you are the one not thinking it through properly. Yes, humanity will use energy. But it is kind of by design that bitcoin uses more and more energy, and that just doesn't make sense. Sorry.
Bitcoin is not humanity using energy. It is humanity flushing energy down the drain.
Bitcoin doesn't have to keep halving until 2140, their governance could decide to stop mining early once it becomes an existential crisis for the network. Bitcoin is code and there could be special cases made so long as they can get the miners to agree. The miners can name their price on processing transactions on the network in lieu of continuing to mine. The transaction processing is much less onerous in terms of power consumption.
I was indirectly referring back to my original post above if you did not notice. And no I'm not high, just having a conversation about Bitcoin energy usage in relation to renewable and sustainable energy technology.
I find the "Bitcoin burns energy" argument completely laughable. With all due respect, your skepticism appreciated; let me explain.
A more useful perspective is "humanity uses more and more energy for computation". The many devices which enable us to post these comments burn energy. The astronomically high video-traffic these days burns energy. Modelling early universe, protein folding, advanced chemistry... every damn thing we compute has the cost of burning energy.
As an aside, let's not forget how much electricity gets used simply for heating. There's no shortage already of "smart heaters" with a nice side effect of mining you some coins while they keep your house warm. Anything environmentally wrong with that?
See, it's not the endgoal of cryptocurrencies to burn energy; it's simply a cost. Now, thanks to bitcoin, we can have economies of scale drive optimization of that cost: improving the core compute-per-joule ratio of our technology. With all the collateral improvements across the globe with regards to environmental impact.
Could you say that porn distribution industry "kind of by design" lead to people watching more and more porn? Regardless of the answer, thanks to that we can have fast internets now. Similarly with bitcoin: thanks to it, we'll pack more & more bitflips into every joule, up to the thermodynamic limit.
Maybe the solution to the Fermi paradox is that significantly advanced civilizations discover crypto currencies and then furiously burn through all available energy sources until they go extinct.
I realized recently it feels like pogs did. Really hot for a minute and then poofed out of relevancy. People also had high value on certain pogs over others ala the hoarding seen in Bitcoin.
I don’t even agree with the scarcity argument. Every Bitcoin represents 100,000,000 traceable assets. The “supply” of an entire Bitcoin may be artificially limited, but practically speaking there are infinite Bitcoin satoshi to trade.
Is there any reliable data on the actual environmental harm? I've heard so many times that it's renewable energy being used because it's so cheap. There was something about mining near dams.
> I've heard so many times that it's renewable energy being used because it's so cheap.
It's a myth from the pro-cryptocurrency crowd.
With recent price spikes, mining is profitable even if you have to pay relative high prices for electricity. You don't need to have cheap energy.
Also, it's another myth that we have an abundance of hydroelectric power that would otherwise go to waste if not for Bitcoin. With modern power transmission it's trivial to send power through the grid to other locations, and nobody is building power plants in the middle of nowhere without a way to send that electricity somewhere else.
Finally, Bitcoin's power consumption is additive. Energy that goes into Bitcoin mining is energy that isn't being used to power cities and other infrastructure, which must still get its power from somewhere.
Don't believe the whitewashing campaigns to downplay Bitcoin's energy usage. It's very bad.
The upper bound on environmental harm is the damage that would be done by the most harmful energy production method used: any renewable energy spent on mining could be used instead to replace that harmful production.
(It's only an upper bound because energy isn't perfectly fungible.)
Renewable energy is also better than fossil energy in terms of environmental damage, but it's not free from damage. A dam is a massive localised environmental impact, and a huge amount of concrete. A solar farm requires (holes-in-ground) mining and significant industrial processing to build. The lower bound on environmental harm is the cost of building renewable energy sources that are used for something so unproductive.
Does all mining apply here? I saw some videos where people were setting up solar panels and minig using that power. If you have a system of solar panels + mining cards, is there more harm compared to no such system (not taking producing solar panels and cards into account).
You have to look at the planet as a set of resources. Resources grow and shrink, but are definite and limited in any given moment all the same. Generally, spending them on less productive tasks is bad. It's cool they are using solar power vs burning gas/coal, but it doesn't change the fact that those same resources would benefit the planet much more if used in a different capacity.
If a billionaire hoarded manufacturing plants and kept them shut down, people would probably be mad, since resources were being wasted, even if it was a net positive on greenhouse gas output.
Each hour 430 quintillion Joules (430 exajoules) of energy from the sun hits the Earth.[1]
It is almost exclusively reflected back out into space, and wasted. We have nearly no incentive to capture it, so the energy is being wasted at a mind boggling scale. I've been mining cryptocurrencies with solar power for about 6 years or so.
The great thing about crypto mining is that it creates a price floor for energy usage. This gives people real incentive to build the tools we need to harness the energy on our planet.
Since we're firmly in the ridiculous arguments camp already, it may as well be pointed out that all of that energy leaving the planet is a good thing. It's why the earth isn't a barren hellscape like venus, whose atmosphere captures energy much more efficiently. Most people would actually prefer that we capture just a bit less than we currently do.
So you are saying we will capture so much energy from the sun that the entire planet will become inhospitable. Do we then just keep burning fossil fuels until earth becomes inhospitable instead? Or do we kill ourselves and stop the need for energy use entirely? Remember that humans will forever have energy needs as we advance.
Absolutely yes, at a sufficiently big-picture view the eventual problem is energy expenditure itself. Capturing more energy from the sun, or more realistically something like large-scale fission/fusion utilization still results in an increased amount of energy being deposited into the earth's atmosphere even aside from the greenhouse effect.
I am obviously not an expert but I looked at the magnitude of the energy itself vs the greenhouse effect and it's about 10-100x less potent than the greenhouse effect. But that means that even if we had 100% clean carbon-free energy, we can't continue increasing our energy utilization forever. And we still have a huge portion of the world that is below a first-world living standard and will eventually want automobiles and air conditioning and vacations using jet travel too.
IF we do not level off the energy consumption of the "first world" standard of living sometime within the next 50-100 years then we are on a course to cook ourselves to death even with 100% clean energy.
What I am really getting out all of this is that at some point we will hit the human population limit that earth can sustain, even with renewable energy sources.
Whether or not that limit is actually reachable and something we should actually worry about I don't know. i.e: is there enough physical space for that many people on earth where each person uses X amount of renewable energy where the sum of X is greater than the amount of energy the earth can actually capture without being negatively affected.
The point is that nothing is as simple as it seems. Using a renewable sources has their own side effects.
Solar? It heats the atmosphere, because it captures solar heat which would bounce back.
Wind? Obviously it slows winds down, and who knows how it affects the existing ecosystem. We know how important the gulf stream is, you wouldn’t want to slow that down..
I've been just casually browsing this discussion, but your comment stands out as an example of the kind of mental gymnastics people are playing to try and justify something so obviously wasteful.
As was pointed out upstream, capital and resources are required to get a solar panel, and if its output is directed to something frivolous like crypto mining, those inputs are being wasted. The fact that there remains unused energy from the sun is completely orthogonal to the waste that is happening.
To be clear, I'm less passing a judgement about the efficiency of crypto than I am pointing out that crafting objectively absurd arguments about why it is not actually wasteful helps nobody.
A) the environmental impact of manufacturing a solar panel is 0 and carbon neutral itself (it's not),
B) there's an excess of solar panels available too (not really),
C) the bitcoin miners aren't often running on coal power during the nighttime hours (they often are), and
D) there's nowhere better for mankind to deploy the capital used in deploying miners and renewable power production than for cryptocurrency mining (dubious).
Solar panels and GPUs use rare metals of which there are a finite quantity, and are also mined through the use of slave labor in some parts of the world.
Nope, no, don't go that way. Yes, the Sun does bathe the Earth with a constant stream of energy, a stream that remains mostly unused. The point is, that it is also mostly not useful energy, energy we have technology to convert into forms we can make use of. And that is a fundamental quality of that Energy.
The infinitesimal portion we do manage to convert with the currently available technology shouldn't be pissed away in the wind so lightly.
There's still the environmental costs related with creation of the panels and cards. Making Circuit boards and Silicon is a costly endeavor in and of itself from an energy and waste standpoint.
ultimately, it's a fraction of miners doing what you say. so as a green miner your personal contribution might be 0, but you're supporting a system that does considerable harm.
as long as a majority of bitcoin mining happens from non-renewable resources, the network as a whole is damaging.
the vast majority of mining happens off renewable energy, because it doesn't make economic sense to mine on non-renewables. its why 'mines' cluster near hydro plants and places that have good solar.
It comes out positive using energy prices from virtually anywhere.
The idea that mining is powered purely by renewables that would somehow otherwise go to waste (that is, not take fossil fuel plants offline) is pure FUD.
Do you apply the same level of concern to the US military? It produces a lot more CO2 emissions than Bitcoin. I don’t think it produces more benefits for normal people either.
The practical utility of crypto is such a joke when compared to the intended use cases that all of the speculators fawn over. The idea that crypto is a "store of value" seems like meager coping with the fact that transaction rates in a distributed system necessarily must suck compared to what Visa, et. al. are doing with IBM mainframes and racks of x86 hardware contained in the same datacenter (i.e. 1~2ms latency domain vs seconds to minutes).
For reference, Visa does thousands to tens-of-thousands of transactions per second. The cost to run one of these transactions is negligible because it can be handled so quickly. Contrast with BTC, which struggles to hit 10 transactions per second on a good day. I used to work in a facility that monitored debit transactions. Our SLAs were ridiculous. Certain customers had requirements that if a single transaction took more than 100 ms, we were to open a ticket and contact their help desk immediately. This is the type of rigor it takes to maintain a financial payment network that consumers will have confidence in using.
This is not something that can be solved with current crypto approaches. There are information theory constraints regarding how long it would take to reach consensus across a distributed system and in such a way that transactions are serializable.
For completeness sake: The BTC network is, by design, setting the difficulty of mining a new block so that its 10 min on avg. Currently there fitting ~2200 transactions in one block [0].
That makes 3.6667 transactions per second. BTC needs a hard fork in order to increase this dramatically.
So you were actually quite generous with 10 transactions per second...
> BTC needs a hard fork in order to increase this dramatically
Which was proposed, and shot down by core Bitcoiners.
They aggressively do not want to increase the transaction limit.
Miners want transactions to be expensive, because that's where they'll get their money when the mining reward falls again.
It's mind boggling that people will complain about banks conspiring to charge them hypothetical fees, then rush to use a cryptocurrency that has double-digit transaction fees when nobody is really using it for anything other than speculation. The reality is that Bitcoiners don't actually want people using Bitcoin as a currency, they just want you to buy and hold. No selling, no spending, just buying. That's the only thing that drives the price up, and that's the only thing they want you to do.
Sure, but why do we need a separate currency for all of this in the first place?
Once all of these cryptocurrencies and exchanges become fast, the price doesn't actually matter. If I can buy the crypto, transfer it, and exchange back out of the crypto to my target currency in seconds, it doesn't matter if SOL is at $0.01 or $100 per coin. If I'm only in it for a few seconds, I just buy and then immediately sell however many coins are needed to move my value from Point A to Point B.
The reason Bitcoiners don't want larger block sizes is that they don't actually want spending. They want Bitcoin to be an asset that only goes up in price. Spending and selling drive the price down, so those need to have high hurdles to discourage that behavior.
> Sure, but why do we need a separate currency for all of this in the first place?
I might be answering the wrong q, but the separate currency represents the cost of a transaction in the network. I.e. the amount you're willing to pay to send a transaction in the network and the amount a staker is willing to receive in exchange for validating your transaction
How else would you represent that cost in a crypto network? Some kind of currency needs to represent the transaction cost.
For those that aren't cryptocurrency enthusiasts it literally doesn't matter. As long as bitcoin and ethereum mining remains they'll always have something they disagree with to point at.
Unlike enthusiasts they don't see it as a necessary step and haven't been following the long and arduous journey of developments and breakthroughs to get here.
Usually, when i do international transfers, i expect a fixed known rate. Transferring to bitcoin or whatever and then having to carry the risks in wild swings in value is not really my cup of tea.
You don't do bitcoin. Bitcoin is impractical. We are talking about crypto in general, not just bitcoin. Nowadays you can for example get xlm from a cex, move it to your wallet and send that. It's fast and with very low fees( lower than paypal etc). There's even a stablecoin you can exchange it for so you dont have to worry about price swings.
How low are you talking about? And hidden fees such as the spread do matter. Last i checked, which was a while ago, paypal wasn't that flash compared to alternatives.
Couple cents with current prices. Ada is reasonably low and nano is feeless but the network is supported by rainbow farts and unicorns so I wouldn't trust it much.
If you stay in crypto (e.g. usdt). Buying in is easy. Cashing it out in viable amounts is very problematic even for individuals, at least where I live. Transferring a usd-crypto-usd million would take a couple of weeks and unclear risks. In US, can you accept usdt from an exchange and grab the cash right away?
Does it give you paper cash? Because I can receive money back from Kraken to my bank account too, but that means 100% local perverted KYC AML trouble even if it’s clear that I sent the exact amount to Kraken from the same account recently.
They wire the money to my bank, of course. I've done this pretty regularly with several different banks for years, and have never been asked even a single question by any of those banks, or ever had them delay the availability of my funds.
I can't tell you from personal experience if it would be the same if my amounts were a million plus, but they are not insignificant amounts either. I'm quite sure that attempting to deposit similar amounts of physical cash at a bank would be at least somewhat challenging.
Try handling millions of automated machine to machine micro transactions per second on the Visa network. The Lightning Network on top of Bitcoin can handle this today.
Because it really doesn't work -- one payment channel works, but that only allows balance reconciliation between two parties (which isn't terribly useful). Lightning aims to construct a routing network from individual channels and there is where things go awry. The channels on each side of a node must be kept in balance. That turns out to be non-trivial to achieve. Today there is no "visa scale" traffic on Lightning. So what you say is both questionable from a theoretical perspective, and certainly not proven in practice yet.
I'm not sure why you would compare Visa with Bitcoin, unless you had no idea what you were talking about.. Visa does not enable one to transact without the rest of the banking system. It's useless on its own. Really pointless point of reference.
Bitcoin (and the other coin systems) ultimately need to be able to handle transactions by a large number of users if they are to gain widespread acceptance. If I want to buy something with my coins, I don't expect to see "Sorry your transaction timed out. Please try again in a few moments". That is NOT confidence inspiring to me as the coin holder, and certainly not to the person/business expecting to receive my coins.
Bitcoin needs to be able to handle at least a few hundred transactions per second as a first goal.
transactions that are not chosen for inclusion in a block (likely due to low transaction fees) do age out of the mempool eventually, so there is a network-enforced "timeout". It's not a hard number but it will eventually happen.
Also obviously there is a human-imposed "timeout" too. Like, if you buy something with Bitpay they expect your transaction to be included in one of the next 3 blocks. If it's not, they will "timeout" the transaction and it bounces. If it is eventually mined for inclusion, they will voluntarily return it to you minus whatever fees they choose to charge (average transaction fee is $24 right now, so you will lose $24 sending it to them, then $24 for them sending it back to you, and $24 to send it again).
(of course they don't have to send it back to you, there is no network-enforced mechanism for this, they could bounce the transaction and then if it gets included an hour later they could not pay you back, the money is under their control once you've signed the transaction. They could even maintain a separate mempool of these "dead" transactions and use a friendly mining pool to process those transactions preferentially...)
Bitcoiners don't actually want people spending Bitcoin.
The entire Bitcoin narrative has become buy and never sell (HODL). The more friction around transacting with your coins (other than buying) the better it is for the asset value.
>The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a scale ceiling. If you're interested, I can go over the ways it would cope with extreme size.
Okay, does Visa offer distributed consensus and verifiable transactions with no central trusted authority? Then it's an apples to oranges comparison isn't it...?
By the same logic, trucks are useless and inefficient because my moped burns 1/100th of the fuel per km.
> This is not something that can be solved with current crypto approaches. There are information theory constraints regarding how long it would take to reach consensus across a distributed system and in such a way that transactions are serializable.
This is demonstrably false. Newer-generation coins offer better tps, and even bitcoin itself can manage due to things like segwit and lightning.
> does Visa offer distributed consensus and verifiable transactions with no central trusted authority?
Ok, I’ll bite.
No, it doesn’t, but what is that actually useful for?
The best answer I can come up with is illegal activities and libertarian fantasies.
Even if one generously frames “illegal activities” in the context of financial freedom from a tyrannical regime, even that has limits.
Any regime with a banking system can implement a KYC-type of policy that will can make interacting financially with anything related to BTC difficult or impossible. Need a modern example? Look no further than online wallets (e.g., Neteller) and online poker sites after the UIGEA.
I will add that if any government views a digital coin as a threat to their fiat currency system, it will be trivially easy for them to make that currency an extremely inefficient store of value. The measures will be draconian towards coin holders, but most people (rightly or wrongly) won’t care.
> I will add that if any government views a digital coin as a threat to their fiat currency system
This fear is greatly exaggerated by people who have bought into the false idea that Bitcoin is the only way to escape inflation.
The definition of inflation is that asset prices go up. You can escape inflation by simply buying assets, or basically anything other than cash.
If someone truly believed massive inflation was coming, they would want to take out USD-denominated mortgages and buy houses. Inflation would increase the value of the houses and reduce the value of your loan repayments.
It's silly that so many people are afraid of the government devaluing their cash that they've decided the best way to escape it is to pile into an asset with an extremely lopsided distribution in favor of early adopters. The average person stands to gain more from recent stimulus than they stand to lose from inflation in their cash accounts. Doubly so if they invest their cash in stocks or assets, which doesn't even require Bitcoin.
> The definition of inflation is that asset prices go up.
The definition of inflation is typically that consumer prices go up due to there being "more money". The only kind of asset that people consume is housing, and even then they don't really - housing as an asset (purchase price) can be disconnected from its consumption price (rent). Besides that, you can't eat stocks so you don't get poorer when the price goes up.
Assets can actually increase in price because of deflation. For instance, technology getting cheaper has made all the stockbrokers drop their transaction fees and add fractional shares, so now everyone can bid up the same stocks.
Ownership. It's the difference between "I own 20 quatloos because the Bank of Endor says so" vs. "I own 20 quatloos". It supports actual ownership instead of representative or proxy ownership.
In the same way that you can have $20 in the bank or $20 in your wallet. When it's in your wallet, it's actually yours and you own it. When it's in your bank account, then you don't actually own it, you must trust that your bank will do the right thing and give it back to you when you ask for it. That level of trust has been wavering for decades.
Remember that Bitcoin was started as a rebellion against the "second bailout for banks".
A buddy of mine mined ~160 BTC (currently about USD $8.1m) back when it was fairly worthless. He left it on a hard drive on one of his many machines. BTC became worth something. He look for said machine and HD. Couldn't find it. That BTC is effectively gone forever. So... who owns it?
Situations like this point to a desire for many/most people to want some sort of custodianship so that they don't accidentally lose something that might be worth millions one day... or even hundreds or thousands one day. At that point, one is looking at banks and banking systems, so we're back at square one.
If one is looking at an alternative to banks, we sometimes/often get stuff like Mt. Gox and Bitfinex -- a situation in which a group of people who want to be independent of the banking system learn the lessons of the value of the banking system the hard way.
So I guess where I am at is that I appreciate a desire to rebel against banks -- they wield way too much power. That said, I don't think that it's particularly prudent (or maybe even possible) to throw the baby out with the bathwater on this matter. The banks definitely do some fairly nefarious stuff, but they also do a metric shitload of very pedestrian-but-useful stuff extremely well on a daily basis. Until a coin can replace that pedestrian-but-useful system with equal grace, I doubt that a coin will be able to replace our current system. Furthermore, somehow if it does, it will be because the current system integrates coins into the current system rather than coins usurping the current system.
So again... what is distributed consensus and verifiable transactions with no central trusted authority actually useful for?
Really? Ignoring the philosophic debate, ownership in terms of BTC deals with the capacity to modify the ledger using an agreed-upon protocol -- but you already know this, and I don't know why you're asking that question. What do _you_ think ownership means in terms of BTC? Do you think you can implement a public system for ownership of digital assets without a distributed consensus system? Or Verifiable transactions? Maybe you can, and if you do I'd love to see it. Good Luck.
How is the thrust of this story any different from someone losing paper cash? How many millions/billions have been lost from physical currency becoming inaccessible?
The issue at hand is the potential value of “distributed consensus and verifiable transactions with no central trusted authority”.
My point is that most people seem to prefer having a central trusted authority, specifically for custodianship.
That’s why most people put money that is significant to them somewhere in the banking system rather than a shoebox or a tin can somewhere. They want that money to be be traceable, accessible, and recoverable.
There are exceptions, of course, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule, IMO.
I can't help but think that the "accessibility" is doing most of the work here. Handling cash is a pain in the ass. Giving a merchant a series of 23 numbers over the computer is comparatively easier.
Okay, so for the foreseeable future: "The practical utility of crypto is such a joke when compared to the intended use cases that all of the speculators fawn over"
Not really a change in semantics here. It's still the point that crypto promised a LOT of really cool things for fintech that realistically won't materialize for a long time.
With the recent defi boom and the increased trust and popularity in oracles serving off chain data I'd say that you can find a cryptocurrency project for most promises.
100k transactions per section w/ serializability and all of the other things required to satisfy real-world concerns like fraud and regulatory constraints?
Today: several thousand tx/sec in "rollups," just by compressing transactions to minimal information and using zero-knowledge proofs that everything is valid. That's in production. The same transaction data is available on chain but e.g. instead of a sig on each transaction you have a compact proof that every tx had a valid sig.
Later: data sharding, where you're doing the same thing but each Ethereum node only has to store a portion of that data. That will multiply rollup capacity by 23X.
Last thing a "crypto" user wants is his account being put on hold for months for various reasons (i.e paypal style), usually "for his own protection". I believe it's a mistake see crypto payments like a replacement for visa/mastercard. It's good to have some competition.
Bold of you to assume that the crypto-crowd have seriously taken fraud and and consumer protections into account. Crypto-currencies are a poor technical “solution” to a socio-economic problem, and while this remains the case associated problems (regulatory constraints, etc) will continue to be things that are relegated to the “don’t care/won’t fix/too hard” basket at worst, and stapled on as an afterthought at best. That’s before we even get to the hardcore libertarian mindset that is incredibly prelevant in crypto-currencies.
It's more than that, they view existing outside the reach of the legal system and consumer protections as being a benefit. "No chargebacks" is a major selling point that the community uses to evangelize to merchants, and the flip side of that is that it's much less protections for consumers.
The Internet doesn't have built in mechanisms for regulation or fraud and nor should it. Cryptocurrencies obviously don't solve the problem, but can be used to create a stricter set of guarentees than the current sustem.
Just to name two examples. Cryptocurrency like cash won't stop you from falling to fraud or illegal activity but communities and regulations could enforce a safe subset of projects with stronger guarentees than the current system.
How are the highly technical users of HN still this ignorant when it comes to a widely adopted 11 year old technology. The main value coming out of Bitcoin is that it is not regulatable by any party, including nation states. You can take your Bitcoin across borders. No one can stop Bitcoin sales like they did with GME. The whole point is to cut middle men and central authorities out of the picture. There is no other technology that does this.
And don't come back with "you shouldn't want to avoid KYC and regulation" as that's a different topic. Others find those properties useful even if you don't.
When the whole conversation starts by talking about environmental externalities, you don't get to hide behind totally-not-criminals who are happy to pay the cost to avoid regulations; we are all paying the costs.
Ok, but that wasn't what the comment I was responding to was talking about at all. An equivalent example would be me saying the value proposition of guns is not that they are pretty but that they propel objects at high speed, and then you arguing that I'm wrong because criminals use them. I'm not arguing the moral dimension at all, but the mechanism.
I'm not a fan of using so much energy, just as I'm not a fan of guns. What does that have to do with discussing how they work and why people use them?
Until you want to turn bitcoin back into useful things, you better hope whoever is on the other side of what you want accepts bitcoin. Other wise it's just a number online that you can't eat with.
My knowledge of this technology isn’t very deep. From my understanding, mining is essential to facilitate transactions, which in turn makes cryptocurrency a currency. Mining needs computing power, which needs energy. More energy translates to more rewards, which incentivises parties to keep mining and keep the network running. Even if you make the underlying calculations more energy efficient, miners are still incentivised to spend more energy to capture more of the reward(?).
Agreed, but that is complete a different matter to the comment I was responding to. The point is that people don't understand why PoW is not going away because they don't even understand the value proposition of PoW cryptocurrency.
If you can't see the practical utility of cryptocurrency in 2021, you're being willfully ignorant.
If you actually believe what you're saying, then short it[1]. If you really think that the practical value is non-existent, then put your money where your mouth is, and take out a short.
This isn't some academic theory where the best you can do is throw tomatoes at it, and ridicule it from a distance. This is an economic theory, where if you are correct, and everyone else is wrong, you can profit significantly from it.
Maybe once you're faced with actually taking a stand on a belief like this, you'll come to understand why cryptocurrencies are beginning to dominate the global economy. It's also totally possible that you're right, but I think it's far more likely that you just like to ridicule things you don't understand because you get some sense of power from shitting on people who you consider to be beneath you.
Nothing you said addresses the core and critical issue that Bitcoin and most blockchain currencies have terrible limitations on transaction-per-second, and are wildly inefficient with power and computing resources for what they provide.
And thinking that bitcoin is a terrible idea is not the same as thinking you can predict its market value. When something is as volatile as bitcoin, shorting it is almost as bad as going long; eventually its value will likely drop but being early is the same as being wrong.
Bitcoin doesn't need high transaction volume to provide value to its users, which is obviously apparent by looking at the current transaction volume.
PoW is also the most efficient way to do what Bitcoin is doing. Attempts to displace PoW have all failed, because the required trade-offs are always too high, and detract from the value of the network.
If you can figure out a fair way to seed value on a network that doesn't require burning energy, then please let the people know, and your new magic cryptocurrency will dominate the crypto-ecosystem overnight. No one would love that more than me. I could talk for hours about the various ideas people have had in the past, and why they failed, but I don't think this is the right place for that rant.
It's also important to recognize that there isn't a single watt of PoW power that's wasted. The power utilized reflects exactly amount of value that Bitcoin is providing to the world. Satoshi also made the mining rewards get cut in half every 4 years, so the value to power usage ratio gets better and better over time.
I could also go on about how mining facilities overwhelmingly are using excess power produced almost entirely from clean power sources. If the goal is reducing carbon emissions, there are so many serious offenders that are massively more wasteful.
Exchanges will provide staking rewards (APR yield) for deposits of ETH. Very quickly they will control enough of the stake to enforce whatever rules they want on the system. As regulated entities, they can be leaned on by the state to change aspects of the system to appease their regulators (KYC, censorship, freezes, etc). Checkmate.
> and are wildly inefficient with power and computing resources for what they provide.
As I've said elsewhere: doing one transaction on bitcoin uses approximately the amount of electrical power that an average US household uses in 2 weeks.
I'm not buying that for a second, unless that calculation includes the power it took to mine the coin in the first place (which is not consumed by the transaction any more than cash changing hands consumes cloth and ink).
How do you think transactions are verified? There's a limit to the number of transactions per block, and each block takes ~10 minutes to mine. So; ~2000 transactions/block, 600 seconds, 0.3 seconds/transaction. How much energy does the global bitcoin network use in 0.3 seconds?
About 700 KwH, far as I can tell. (Based on 76.87 terawatt hours annually in 2020, as an estimate for bitcoin). A house uses ~1000/month, ballpark.
"The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"
If I could short bitcoin over a 20, 30, 40 year timeframe I absolutely would, unfortunately that's not possible. There might be utility in some cryptocurrencies for some applications, but bitcoin as it currently exists is worse than useless, it's actively harmful.
Moving money over the internet without needing a central authority.
It really doesn't matter if you don't recognize how big of a deal that is, but to A LOT of people, it's a complete game changer. If you don't need a service like that, well that's fine, but obviously a lot of people do, which is why the network is where it is today. Massive amounts of value is being moved through the network daily, and the fees that people are paying to utilize the network are not at all trivial. It's worth it to them though, or they wouldn't be using it.
If I recall correctly; they already do this by really limiting mixed precision performance on the GeForce line. I believe Titans typically where excluded, but otherwise for full FP16 support you needed a Quadro or Tesla card.
Yes, that is worrying. But, they already have license in place to ensure no one uses their gaming GPUs in the cloud, where the big money is already. (And it worked, I cannot find any low-cost cloud providers with gaming GPUs for GPGPU computing).
I hope they don't, given that there is limited upside and a lot of push back from dev community.
So let’s wait until BTC hits $100k and a generic videocard for any purpose costs $5000. That would be much better than paying extra $200 over MSRP for ML. /s
That would suck in the short term, but it would also be a HUGE incentive to massively ramp up chip fabrication capacity, leading to long term cost decrease due to economies of scale.
I don’t, that was a blind guess that missed. Insert a real extra and compare to the prospect of crypto prices rising and nvidia doing nothing. What would ML people gain from that while gamers lose all?
Yeah, the ML example doesn't really work because we're already paying through the nose for the privilege of running GPU's in production processes. This development is really nothing new, Nvidia and ATI (and Intel and AMD) have always charged extra for their "professional" lineups usually enforced through software alone or even just the EULA.
> I really wish Nvidia would do this across the RTX product line.
I'd rather they have scaled up the demand. They've had years of this to take the higher profits and invest them. Even if people don't use them for mining, the demand for Machine Learning is there - instead GeForce cards have been banned for use in data centers for years. Not to mention that the crippling of 3060 would be trivial for mining operations to get around.
Sounds like a good opportunity for the US to significantly expand its domestic chap manufacturing industry. I don't care if the lag time is 5 years or more before the first chip rolls off the production lines - because I don't anticipate demand for chips will significantly reduce in the future.
Development of domestic chip manufacturing might even start to become a national security concern, leading to even more money flowing in on top of the money coming from crypto miners.
TSM is slammed with chip demand from Apple, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and others. Like, 100% booked for the next year or two. They have been heavily investing in state of the art manufacturing facilities for decades and it's still not enough.
I understand Nvidia is no angel. And I'm totally OK with them doing the right thing for the wrong reason.
Also, my concern is not for data centers running creepy ML models that invade users' privacy, but for the average home user who wants to get started with ML and at the same time get decent frame rates when they play a game.
> but for the average home user who wants to get started with ML and at the same time get decent frame rates when they play a game.
Getting started with ML doesn't require a GPU at all. Realistically, any video card or even a modern CPU is more than sufficient to get started with ML learning.
It's a myth that $1000 gaming video cards are necessary or even helpful for learning basic ML.
>I understand Nvidia is no angel. And I'm totally OK with them doing the right thing for the wrong reason.
My argument is they should and could have scaled up the production rather than just shuffling around which group they hurt or help at the expense of which other (be it miners, ML folks or gamers). This isn't the 'right thing', it just helps the group you prefer on this round.
You do understand Nvidia is a fabless company, correct? Scaling up demand isn't just calling up some factory manager and telling them to work harder, it's getting into a massive cagefight with AMD, Apple, and every other company out there that needs silicon all for the amusement of Samsung/TSMC
Ask AMD why scaling up to mining demand is a bad idea.
A sudden implosion of demand combined with a flooding of the used GPU marked. Better not plan on bringing out any new GPU architectures when your warehouses are still full of the previous generation.
Except with NVIDIA there's already extra demand if they need it - they can allow GeForce into data centers which are currently artificially disallowed.
Fundimental supply issues aren't going to be solved by releasing a mining variant and artificially limiting a gaming variant. At the end of the day this is still a supply and demand problem. I bet that we'll still see 3060s being scalped and brought at ridiculous markup.
Just becuase your use case is more noble doesn't change the fundimental issue of supply and demand. Nividia also already has artificial restrictions on their GTX and RTX lines to produce a product for your use case: the Tesla series.
I think it absolutely makes sense for them to customize their products for the market they want to serve, even if it is artificial, that is their prerogative. But the product is just for gamers that want better games. I think it's funny that is the moral high road here.
They should be free to create products that foster the community they believe will give them the best returns in the long run. Clearly they don't think that is crypto, they probably think it is either a fad, or that it will move to proof of stake, and that the demand will subside. So if they leave their core community high and dry during that time they could lose favor. I don't know if that's right or wrong, they clearly have way more insight than I, but either way I support their right to make the decision. They aren't the only company in the world, others should step up if they see a frothy market.
ML is a bit different in that the applications are probably here to stay, and the applications are "legit". But, the ML market will not have the same brand loyalty that the consumer gaming market will. Consumers like brands and they stick with them. Companies spending money on ML are going to flock to the cheapest TCO, and a lot of this will also be abstracted through cloud offerings.
In short, they don't want to piss off what they believe to be their cash cow for years to come.
I see that as just another hardware manufacturer limiting what people can do with their hardware. And "creating tailored products for customers with specific needs" ? Just regular old market segmentation as they've always done, to extract more profit. Don't be mistaken, thus is about money, Nvidia does not act in the interests of the end user but their own. "think of the gamers" is just a way to put their foot in the door.
It would be very suspicious of nvidia if it acted in others interests. What bugs me most is that in many win-win situations (specifically, nvidia takes more markets, I get a videocard for much less than $2500) there is a guy who proclaims freedom über alles, stretching good intentions ad absurdum.
> Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation
I've actually been wondering about this -- are there any major ones that meaningfully provide other kinds of value for all of the computational resources they're using?
My understanding of blockchain as a concept is pretty surface-level, so maybe I'm just missing something obvious here. But at least at first glance, it kind of baffles me that so many of them are using seemingly arbitrary hash algorithms to calculate proof of work, when they could instead be tied to distributed projects -- folding@home, for instance -- and measuring actual work.
Actual work can be monetized. The waste demonstrates commitment to the truth. Any non-waste reduces the security of the commitment, as you're getting paid no matter what.
It exists, it's called GridCoin. It's a proof of stake chain that disburses coins based on work units completed on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC).
There's a few others that take different approaches like Golem Network Token, Nym, Oxen, etc.
It doesn't surprise me. My 2yo GPU is selling in EU for double the price I originally bought it from the same retailer. Its the first time computer hardware is actually not depreciating but gaining value as it ages.
When I upgraded to a 3070 I sold my 1080 Ti for 50% more than I paid for it and at this point I think I could have gotten more (it was a blower so not exactly a desirable card though). Cost me 100 bucks after tax to do the upgrade. Then I scored a 3080 and sold the 3070 for $700 plus shipping.
It's to the point where I'm thinking about selling my "backup" 1060 3GB card, but if my GPU died then I would be in real trouble because lol at getting ahold of GPUs right now.
A year ago I bought a RTX 3070 when I rebuilt my entertainment rig. I replaced a GTX1080 and got rid of it. I should have kept it and resold it. It's crazy and I wish there were two categories of cards. Mining cards and Gaming cards. Looks like NVidia feels the same and is making dedicated cards for the basement farmers.
Besides, a Syrian refugees who can manage to get their liquid assets into a digital store like bitcoin could probably alsoamage to get them into a commodities account and buy gold. Bitcoin isn't the only way, or even most convenient way, of moving assets across borders.
Cryptocurrencies are supposedly popular among Venezuelans, although I wonder what the advantage is of using them versus any fiat that isn't the bolivar.
Anyway, seems easier for them to obtain crypto than getting a commodities account and buying gold, since presumably one would have to deal with KYC/AML in that case, and one can continue to use crypto as a currency within the country (though I doubt Bitcoin, since the transaction fees probably amount to more than a typical Venezuelan earns in a month).
That is why there is the need to at the very least discuss government taxation over the mining and transaction of cryptocurrency without evoquing heated but unfruitful debate
Im curious to know how much more in taxes you think I should have to pay on my mining profits above and beyond the capital gains taxes I already have to pay.
I'd understand if you wanted all economic activity to have to figure in the negative externalities before a profit could be realized by stake/shareholders, but your comment implies to me that crypto should have some kind of special tax because you're upset you cant buy a gpu.
This is exactly the kind of antagonism that is detrimental to everybody. Read op comment again:
> Mining trashes the environment and, for the majority of crypto assets/volumes, does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity besides speculation
I am not "upset I can't buy a GPU", mining uses a lot of power[1] and its environmental impact is not being taken into consideration. So yeah, if mining is damaging the planet and if we can assess the damage quantitatively and link it to mining without a doubt, it should have to be taxed accordingly.
> So yeah, if mining is damaging the planet and if we can assess the damage quantitatively and link it to mining without a doubt, it should have to be taxed accordingly.
Replace 'mining' with 'anything' and I fully understand as I'd said.
If I'm running 3,000 watts worth of GPUs at home to heat my house, and you're running 3,000 watts worth of space heaters at your house, I'm certainly not damaging the environment anymore than you are.
We should both pay the FULL cost of the toll the generation of the required electricity cost to run our equipment. Why I should pay taxes above and beyond what I already do because my heater makes money is where you totally loose me.
The environmental impact of mining is quite substantial and I agree that this calls into question whether cryptocurrencies are of overall benefit to society.
However, it is important to note that mining does do something useful: it secures the network from attack. To my knowledge, there is no known alternative solution to the distributed trust-free consensus problem.
> does not provide genuinely valuable economic activity
Not yet, but don't presume current economical status quo is working flawlessly. The current monetary system is kind of a joke, it no longer is backed by gold, in fact it's not backed by anything. So if you think about it for more than a minute why should it be that currency in the US should have any value? Creating an alternate store of value that is not just printed or made up and can be proven to exist at the very least provides something not too dissimilar to a database backup in case of a complete meltdown of fiat currency. It, however, does need to be allowed to get sufficiently big for a future restore to work. That is worth a bit of electricity. Yes, a bit, as a percentage of the GDP.
Yeah the shortages of RTX 3000 series cards are likely actively reducing AI/ML innovations in the short term. I have no idea what to do about these shortages - but it seems to be something that needs more regulation so that crypto miners don't continue to hoard the cards.
Isn't there an incentive for the world if NVDA continue s innovating in their GPUs such that they use less energy to achieve the same result as years prior?
Someone clearly hasn't figured out what Ethereum is, or Ethereum 2.0 in how proof of stake actually makes most of your weak premise completely evaporate.
Is that easy? I assume they are going to have Syrian pounds as cash. Then I guess you need to put them in a local bank account and use that account to buy BTC. Can you buy BTC with Syrian pounds? If yes, wouldn't the exchange rate be dreadful? I'm not sure exactly who would want SYP.
You need someone to accept Syrian pounds for the nvidia gpu too, and you need to buy electricity and have functional internet service... there’s really no reason to mine instead of buy in this case.
Good question. I don't know the details, but early on in Assad's war against Syrians, the situation was easier than it is now. In 2012/2013, a lot of cash was taken to neighboring countries.
Sounds like it's time to crack some NVIDIA drivers. I already do it for the video encoding limitations, why not this too? Miners are willing to go to some really hacky extremes, reflashing firmwares, custom fan mods, extreme overclock configurations, etc to maximize hashrates and certainly won't care if they have to jump through some hoops to patch a specific version of the Linux driver or enable unsigned drivers on Windows, as long as they make more profit.
Good luck with this one NVIDIA but you're playing a losing game. As soon as one un-restricted version of the driver exists, this is as good as useless and demand will be the same as ever for these cards unless they're able to ship CMP cards at a very high rate, but my understanding is the restriction here is silicon.
Let's not forget that last time they produced "mining only" cards, people managed to crack the drivers to render graphics too... this is no exception.
Someone with early access to 3060 hardware, but not access to the launch drivers managed to wrangle it into working on pre-3060 drivers and still found that mining performance was artificially reduced. It starts high then falls off after a minute or so when some heuristic decides that mining is happening.
There's speculation that the limiter might actually live in the cards VBIOS, which is much harder to modify than the driver as newer Nvidia cards require a signed VBIOS to boot.
I'm really curious about how they got the card working without the specific drivers for it.
I'm also curious if this "mining detection" is going to kick in "accidentally" on other compute loads. It would be really crappy if the CUDA performance of these cards is bad because they don't want miners using them.
YES! I hope so if only to feel like I am back in the scene for just a moment. Miss those days. Maybe they can mod the VBIOS to show the crack group's logo on bootup just like how old VGA cards would show some company text before handing off to the PC.
The connection to the monitor is physically located on the video card. So the gpu could display whatever it wants without asking or coordinating with the motherboard.
It basically depends on three things though. The CMP card supply needs to be sufficient for the miners' demand, they can't be more expensive, and the question of how much does being able to resell the cards to gamers play into the value proposition.
I actually avoid the used video card market now, the resale price is insanely high and odds are the card was driven as hard as possible for months at a time mining crypto before being swapped out for the latest and greatest.
Nvidia is effectively incentivizing the cracking of their driver and firmware security signing with millions of dollars. Because a person who cracks it can build a more profitable mining farm
It's a sort of accidental bug bounty and I wonder if Nvidia have really thought this through?
Indeed, I remember when I was doing some mining early in bitcoin's history. I had custom hacked BIOS on my AMD cards to be able to overclock beyond regular power limits. This flashing was possible only due to an exploit of the BIOS signature verification.
Given that I was doing this as only a rather casual miner with three GPUs, I have no doubt that this new restriction will be attacked ruthlessly.
Is it even in theory possible to produce silicon that does not perform well on crypto operations while allows 3D to run at full speed? Or do they simply rely on the same underlying operations?
wouldn't hashing be mostly int operations, while 3D graphics would be FP32? I dunno if they still do this, but nvidia used to artificially limit the rate for other float widths on geforce parts to segment the market.
Its not question if miners can/will crack it at some point (yes, they can). Question is how many miners will order the cards on day 0 without knowing if they can be used? The intention here is only to deter them enough that gamers have at least slightly better chance of getting these cards, and especially for launch-day orders.
Maybe it's time to create an adversarial network that can figure out how to mine on the GPU without causing it to halve the hash rate, train that network on an NVIDIA GPU, and shove it to them.
Gamers hate miners, they're driving the price up, make hardware impossible to get ect ... It's a really problematic situation. Almost 6 month after launching new graphic cards from AMD / NVIDIA good luck gettting an RTX 30xx or 6800.
On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing power consumption. When people designed those currency they def did not think about that.
This is why Ethereum is moving to proof-of-stake. Saying that virtual currency is wrong because the biggest currency is unwilling to innovate is wrong.
The PoS network is actually up now, it'll still be a year or two until the old network is connected in, and the PoW can be shut off though. Real progress has been made in that area.
It doesn't matter. Gaming hardware will be used for mining as long as there is any single popular cryptocurrency that's POW and doesn't have dedicated ASICs.
On this point, I don't get why "ASIC resistance" is a feature of cryptocurrencies (Not that it's impossible, just something people like to say). We're in the same boat because no one can get a GPU, and at least those can game/do ML.
It was introduced to reduce 51% attack possibility. Graphics cards are (were) abundant and not concentrated in e.g. China, which probably produces all asics in the world. Now it is just a nonsense, because crypto essentially = BTC and it doesn’t have this “feature”.
Beacon chain is live with over $5 billion in ETH deposited so far, and has been running flawlessly since its December 1 launch. There are minor tweaks coming this summer. A few months after that, if everything still looks good, they'll migrate the legacy chain to it and proof-of-work on Ethereum will end.
The migration is a decent amount of work but it's not the difficult research task that the beacon chain was. Someone did a proof-of-concept in about a day, though the exact plan has changed since then.
If no one wants to buy the old ETH, then it won't be profitable to mine, so no one will mine it. Without mining there is no security (as far as the old PoW chain is concerned.)
Kind of like how Ethereum Classic (ETC) is subject to 51% attacks every other week and requires multiple days' worth of confirmations after deposit to any exchange.
It's a continuous process that is already in progress and aimed at (mostly) completing in 2022.
For what is worth, ETH PoS alternatives are also gaining a lot of ground in the mean time.
They've been "moving to proof of stake" for something like three years.
The miners are making money off of them not moving to proof of stake. The miners stop making money when they move to proof of stake. The only people who can actually allow the chain to move to proof of stake are the miners.
Meanwhile, xtz and ada have been proof of stake since their inception, 3+ years already for both.
I mean I'm also disappointed by the slow pace of the transition, but they are clearly making progress towards it.
They've been _planning_ to move to PoS for ~3 years, with a much too optimistic timeline. In the meantime a lot of companies working towards that have collapsed or refocused on other efforts, delaying the whole transition. It will probably take another ~3 years (my personal estimate) until the transition is reasonably finished and core parts of the ecosystems have migrated, but at least it's moving into the right direction.
Yes, but back then nothing more than the first few ideas towards their PoS existed IIRC.
2-3 years ago is when the Casper FFG paper was published and subsequently the architecture of Ethereum 2.0 (and the concrete 3-phase roadmap towards it) were published.
There is nothing the miners can do to stop the migration, any more than they can stop you from making your own fork of Ethereum and convincing your friends to run it.
The miners can keep running the legacy version, and try to convince users and exchanges to stick with it. Given the massive community support for PoS, they're not likely to be very successful.
They claim they are going to fork ETH to make a POS fork of it. Now the people claiming this are going to want you to believe that’s the “real” eth- but the miners may not agree. They have no incentive to do so.
And yes, they can absolutely keep running the real chain and let the chips fall where they may. Given that course of action benefits them, and the other benefits Vitalik and his whale friends...
It doesn't matter what the miners believe, if the exchanges, applications, and users have moved to the PoS chain. Which is very likely to happen, given the community support for PoS, the scaling coming on that side at around the same time, and the fact that exchanges are already letting users earn returns by staking ETH, while the exchanges take a percentage of profits.
I think you are projecting your belief about ETH v3.0 or whatever it is onto a lot of people who don't agree with you.
Vitalik et all have been talking about pos for years. Meanwhile a huge portion of the cryptocurrency space went there already (years ago) and left eth behind. POS isn't some new technology.
As a random user of ETH: I'm going to go to the PoS fork because of the (implied) fee difference. ~$50 for a wire is going to kill the chain (imho), and I don't see miners incentivized to handle that.
Peercoin introduced proof-of-stake in 2012, and Nano/XRB used it at its inception in 2015. So, yes, cryptocoins have had PoS in production for quite a while.
Does this argument apply to anyone making a profit so long as they use energy? How can you make profit without energy? I'd think to lose money you will also need energy.
I remember that argument being made 2 years ago during the last mining craze.
Given the existing investment in Ethereum HW, it almost seems like it’s just a carrot to deflect criticism about power consumption, but not something that will actually happen.
It's already running with $5 billion in ETH deposited. It'll take some more time before migrating the legacy chain, but the really hard part is live. There was nothing like that two years ago.
You mean "the really easy part"? The Beacon Chain doesn't do much at all. Last time I checked, they hadn't even got a design for how contract code would be executed in Eth 2.0.
Yes, consensus is the hard part. That was a massive research effort, with a lot of game theory and recently-invented cryptography.
Once you have that, you can get consensus on literally any data just by putting a hash of that data in each beacon chain block. In this case, a hash of the EVM state, while the EVM runs as before.
There's still some discussion on the design, but that's more about deciding the best of multiple options, rather than figuring out how to do it at all. As I mentioned in another comment, someone built a running proof-of-concept in about a day.
Consensus is not the hard part. By "game theory", you mean "agree with everyone else, or we'll take your Eth away".
The hard part is figuring out how to execute arbitrary code and synchronize it across all shards, without removing the benefits of having shards in the first place.
Shard execution isn't necessary for migrating to proof-of-stake. The PoS migration just links a single EVM to the beacon chain; that's enough to remove PoW, i.e. the main concern in this discussion about GPUs.
Around the same time is the migration to data sharding, which multiplies data storage by 23X initially. That's without code execution on the shards.
Zkrollups in production now do the execution off-chain. On chain, you store compressed state data and a compact proof that everything executed correctly. That's good for a couple thousand tx/sec today, and 23X that after data sharding. Given that, Vitalik has argued that shard execution may not even be necessary; it wouldn't add nearly so much transaction capacity as we'd have already.
Here are the papers on how Ethereum consensus actually works:
Not even equal. A GPU running games can coast on 100W-150W usage, whereas mining can and frequently stretches it to full power capacity, e.g. 320W on RTX 3080. Not to mention that mining is 24/7, gaming is not.
So no, not equal, not greater, in fact lower. And I think the Graphics Processing Unit should process graphics, don't you?
> On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing power consumption. When people designed those currency they def did not think about that.
And they probably didn't factor in ASIC miners and large mining pools, either. Proof of Work is legacy technology at this point, it's a good thing Ethereum is moving to Proof of Stake along with most of the ecosystem.
We did think about it but wanted both the simplest possible consensus model and the widest possible distribution of coins, which led us to Proof of Work (geared to lower-power ASICs) and fixed block reward. Proof of Stake is much more complicated, is subjective, and doesn't provide for coin distribution.
Proof of stake is a solved problem, has a fixed block reward, has no ASICS or need for them, is no more complicated, is not in anyway subjective, and distributes coins just fine as both ADA and XTZ are doing right now.
They are correct that proof-of-stake doesn't solve the initial wealth distribution problem. ADA and XTZ solve it by pre-mining the coins.
Ethereum is instead solving it by having an initial proof-of-work period and then moving to proof-of-stake after some amount of mining and wealth distribution has already happened.
They secure the network by showing up and participating with minimal calculation. I don't think that falls under proof of work. Even if it does, it's not the terminology that matters. What matters is that there is no reward for burning cycles.
I feel so lucky to buy RTX 2060 two years ago. It's still a good card if you're not doing 4K gaming, and right now it costs more than when I bought it.
When I started building a computer and realized these new cards were going to be unobtainium last fall, I bought a used 1080ti instead. Despite being older it still holds its own against newer cards. Lacking RT and DLSS features (which didn't matter much to me), it was reselling at a sizeable discount vs comparable used 20x0 cards.
Five months later I still have my eBay searches saved, and the exact model I bought is now regularly selling for 40+% more than it cost me. There's one right now with a few hours left on the clock, currently going for 50% more than I paid, with 75 watchers and 51 bids. It's wild.
Warren Buffett, the renowned investor, famously dismissed gold in a speech given at Harvard in 1998. He said: “It gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or some place. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head.”
It sucks that gold is so desired just for its look. If it were cheaper it would be used a lot more for technological devices.
I can't wait until asteroid mining crashes the gold price and hopefully puts an end to the ecological disaster that is gold mining.
Diamonds are worse; they are only expensive because the supply is artificially restricted, and the marketing makes it obligatory for every groom to buy a diamond ring.
As far as I know (last time I googled it) if speculation was removed and hoarding, gold would be worth about $100 an ounce for the things we need it for.
So yes we do have alternatives to gold. Things such as Bitcoin and crypto, which keep going up in value, while gold speculation has stagnated and is even going down. Weakening dollar and massive debts due to the pandemic should mean gold skyrockets, but people are buying the alternatives. It looks grim for gold. Tesla didn’t buy gold, they bought Bitcoin.
Not to take a side in this fight but i find the counter argument about the environmental cost of regular currencies interesting.
How much co2 is emitted in the clearing of dollar transactions vs the clearing of bitcoin for example. That’s a whole lot of data centres.
I’m not persuaded that we can put costs like legal (or even military) protection under just the dollar column - if you steal my $CO2COIN i can leverage the legal system to pursue you.
The dollar is backed by the petro-dollar, the fact that Saudi Arabia and friends only accept dollars when selling oil is one of the reason the dollar is strong. When you factor in that the US military protects the petro-dollar while at the same time being the biggest consumer on earth of oil, it starts adding up. Europe and therefore the Euro is also protected by the US army. All of a sudden, your fiat's energy consumption is probably much bigger than bitcoin ever will be.
It's not like we'd stop protecting our oil supply if we converted to Bitcoin. We'd still need oil for cars and planes and so on. If we manage to stop using oil, we won't need the military to protect it anymore, even if we haven't converted to Bitcoin.
So I don't think we can lay the military's oil consumption at fiat's feet.
It has nothing to do with protecting the oil supply. The U.S. military is deployed to ensure that oil producing countries don't go and sell their oil for anything other than dollars. Protecting the oil is completely orthogonal.
The dollar being strong or not doesn't change the fact that a transaction in any currency is several orders of magnitude more energy-efficient than with bitcoin.
It is estimated that the carbon footprint of a single Bitcoin transaction is 660 lbs of CO2 (not a typo), equivalent to that of 670,000 VISA transactions.
The vast majority of BTC mining is done in facilities that are colocated with hydro dams in China, so the CO2 emission is not what you might expect just hearing the number of KWH being used.
I think that the bitcoin mining companies that run in China have a pretty good handle on how to get very low cost electricity, and hydro doesn't produce the CO2 emissions you're so concerned about.
His point is that crypto mining isn't using some carbon neutral electricity that was just lying around unused. If crypto minors didn't exist that hydro electricity would have been used for something useful. So by mining crypto unless you actually build extra hydro power stations for them you are 100% adding to CO2 emissions.
Hydro dams actually incur significant greenhouse gas emissions especially during the initial fill where all the material that's now submerged rots and produces methane.
But that’s not what I said. I said the amount of CO2 being generated was probably not as high as you might expect from a naive reading of the kWh consumed.
Sure, but to truly avoid all naive readings would be to analyse the total impact of constructing the hydro plant in such an out of the way place for the purpose of mining.
There's an emissions cost to producing the equipment required to construct the hydro plant.
There's an emissions cost associated with constructing the hydro plant.
This is multiplied if you are building it in an area without heavy industry (no existing demand, remember?) - because you have to construct your own support infrastructure and road network to build and service the plant.
Not to mention the impact of the now flooded 'wilderness' (which is highly likely to contain carbon sinks).
Or the impact to forestation and vegetation downstream.
Right, which is a major problem for the decentralized currency narrative. It also creates a massive incentive for market manipulation to continue keeping prices high enough for them to get ROI on the mining investment.
I'm trying to imagine what you think went through the mind of Satoshi Nakamoto. Do you imagine he just woke up one day and said "You know what I like? Carbon emissions! For no reason but carbon emissions! Somehow, I benefit from carbon emissions!". I really just don't think that's how it panned out.
I do have to say that environmental harm from bitcoin vs any other dumb thing people use computers for seems somewhat odd, but I'm happy to admit that I definitely haven't looked into it enough to argue. That's not what I was arguing though, I only ever commented to specifically refute that any environmental damage was deliberate, because it struck me as an especially absurd statement. I can totally see how it may have come across as an argument that because the harm wasn't deliberate it isn't bad, that was my bad. I should have made that more clear.
> On a side note all those virtual currency are just plain wrong on the environment side, it does not make any sense in 2021 to have a currency that need heavy computation thus increasing power consumption.
I don't know how can you say that after volatility in banking systems crashed large parts of economies of at least a few developed countries leading to resurgence of nationalist leaders that fuel and use those sentiments in people damaged by banks gambling on stuff they can't be trusted to count properly.
We'll see how well your wealth gets preserved when China stops buying US debt for whatever reason and oil is sold for euros or yuans. I think there will be proper mess in global economies and you might use a thing that can't be fudged by people.
But croptocurrencies have legitimate value propositions that needs to be recognized if you want to put the emission/energy-argument forward in good faith.
Great demand usually does great things for the future of supply and since renewables are getting cheapest I think they will get the most development in the future. We may end up with way more resilient power grid and abundance of clean energy thanks to cryptocurrencies.
This is a very hot take! If you believe this, you should oppose all measures to conserve energy, and advocate for dumping as much energy into the atmosphere as heat waste as possible. There’s nothing about the argument that applies to crypto more than any other energy use.
Energy dumped as heat into the atmosphere does nothing bad to the climate.
And I am not particularly for any energy conservation measures. Except for isolating buildings because most dirty stuff we burn is for that purpose and not isolating your home is just negligence.
Wasting electrical energy is only bad because it came from burning stuff. But I don't think any fossil fuel power plant was closed because people used less. Maybe some were not built because of that, but then some renewables and nuclear power were not built for that reason as well and I believe that's very bad.
How far does this mindset extend? Would you support spoiling food to increase demand for more efficient food production? Destroying homes to increase demand for more efficient home construction?
> Wasting electrical energy is only bad because it came from burning stuff. But I don't think any fossil fuel power plant was closed because people used less.
Coal plants are indeed closing because they are no longer profitable. Natural gas is the main “on-demand” power source, and plants raise and lower production based on demand. Increased power consumption will delay the transition away from coal, and keep natural gas plants running more often.
Destroying few delapidated homes to make space to build a block of flats on that plot of land? Sure!
But not to drive up demand there are better ways to do that in case of housing. There are places where more efficient housing can't be built bot because lack of demand but local regulations that serve local wealth owners.
Waste food... Not so much bacause food preduction doesn't really suffer as a result of low demand. We pretty much grow food as efficiently as it is possible and in places we don't we do it for different reasons than just lack of demand. There are food producers that destroy some food they produced to drive up the prices by increasing ratio of demand to supply.
Coal power plants close because there are cheaper ways to make electricity now, not because demand dropped.
Crypto mining operations can provide load on-demand which is almost as good as power production on demand while balancing power grid.
Nuclear power plant plus huge crypto mine can provide as much flexibility as coal power plant if not more.
> Coal power plants close because there are cheaper ways to make electricity now, not because demand dropped.
The price for power is set by supply and demand. Increased demand for power increases the price. This means that coal plants can afford to operate depending on the amount of demand.
Any increase in demand for power will increase carbon emission by keeping coal plants from shutting down, building more natural natural gas plants, and keeping those plants online more often. Renewables are important, but only satisfy a minority of demand for electricity.
Can't argue with that. Low power demand accelerates decommissioning coal based power plants that was planned already. We save some CO2 with that short term. But demand will bounce back eventually after the pandemic and things will not get better without significant investments in power generation. And massive demand is what drives the investment.
In CO2 free future we'll have all of home heating running on electricity and all of our transportation too. Power generation needs incredible amount of investments over the next 50 years. I believe crypto mining might drive those investments so we are ready for that future.
The environmental impact of "Proof of Work" could have been a problem but the inventors did think about that and realized that mining can be done pretty much anywhere, using renewable resources that would otherwise be untapped. As usual the ethical burden should be on the user of the tool, not the tool itself.
In the long run miners who do not use untapped (cheaper) renewables are going to be priced out, it just takes some time. That said other protocols much less computationally intensive, such as "Proof of Stake", are starting to be tested.
> As usual the ethical burden should be on the user of the tool, not the tool itself.
I dunno. Suppose Acme, Inc. starts selling a giant red button. When pressed, it means my boss will decide to give me the rest of the day off, no strings attached. There's a little disclaimer in the fine print that warns that whenever the button is pressed, Acme, Inc. will roll a 6-sided die. Whenever a 1 is rolled, a small child in Kenya will be executed.
Individual users of the product can claim that they aren't directly responsible for the externalities, because "I'm not the one performing the executions!" or "my dice roll was a four!".
Or, perhaps there are business users of the product, who are motivated by cost and nothing else. Good luck convincing a company that ethics are more important than its bottom line.
Sometimes users of a product are so detached from its consequences that they're willing to accept them, even if the true result is horrible. We should certainly hold companies accountable for exploiting human nature in this way.
"Gold mining is a waste, but that waste is far less than the utility of having gold available as a medium of exchange.
I think the case will be the same for Bitcoin. The utility of the exchanges made possible by Bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used. Therefore, not having Bitcoin would be the net waste."
I think we're long past this point and we have better alternatives to PoW now.
Proof of work was not invented (or envisioned to be used with digital currencies) by Satoshi. It's been around since 1993. I can't really find a reference to prove what I claimed so I would agree I might have been misled to think that. But the truth is that it doesn't matter whether it was taken into account or not, what matters is that you can mine Bitcoin (or do any PoW) using untapped renewable resources (which is why big mining operations are based in places with abundant geothermal/hydropower and very little, if any, population) but you wouldn't be able to do much else in those places.
The CBECI tool estimates that bitcoin consumes about 15.24 gigawatts.
There are approximately 2 million employees working at FDIC insured banks in the United States.[2] There are approximately 330 million people in the United States.[3] United States food production uses about 10 quadrillion BTUs per year (about 332 gigawatts = [10 quadrillion BTU / (365246060) sec to gigawatts]). 332 gigawatts / 330 million ~ 1kW. That's approximately 1 kilowatt per person in the United States. There are probably some good arguments about exports etc but we will hold that aside for now. In 2019, total U.S. primary energy consumption per person (or per capita consumption) was about 305 million British thermal units (Btu).[5] = 305 million btu / (365246060) sec = 10kW. So, we get around 11kW per person for the total food and primary energy consumption rate.
11kW / person * 2 million people = 22 gigawatts
So, we come to the conclusion that if you look at the people employed by FDIC insured banks in the United States alone, they have a larger impact on the environment than bitcoin. If my calculations are correct, maybe we don't need this complaint to be the same first post in every thread on crypto.
Maybe I'm missing something or have done an incorrect calculation, if so, please point it out.
You are comparing (baseline US power use/person x number of people working at banks) to (power consumed to do the computations to operate the bitcoin blockchain).
I fail to see how this is relevant to the question of how bitcoin compares to the banking system as a system for storing and transferring money from an energy perspective.
The relevant comparison would be to compare the costs of doing a similar volume of similar operations using bitcoin and the bank system.
You miss the fact that what bitcoin does is a tiny fraction of what banks do.
I mean, how do you do for example mortgages or corporate finance with bitcoin - without hiring all the people and using all the resources current financial system does?
Frankly, more proper comparison would be the resource consumption of using gold in the financial system.
How many people work on Bitcoin (mining, exchanges like Coinbase etc)? What's the number of transactions (money transfers, loans etc) per employee in banking vs Bitcoin ecosystem?
It's going to take days for mining operations to reverse-engineer the driver and undo this. So commercial operations won't be affected at all.
Worse, their detection isn't going to be 100% perfect. What if After Effects does something that looks "kind of" like mining. Is it just going to be crippled? What will nvidia do then? Suggest I buy a Quadro for AE support?
Currently, average users can't get their hands on any of these cards because they're being bought in bulk by crypto miners. As soon as mining becomes unprofitable, the market will be flooded with cards that have been run 24/7 for months or years, which isn't a recipe for a good experience.
The average user can only benefit from getting access to these cards again. nVidia knows they can't afford to burn goodwill with their customers, whom they depend on to buy card upgrades every few years.
> Worse, their detection isn't going to be 100% perfect. What if After Effects does something that looks "kind of" like mining. Is it just going to be crippled? What will nvidia do then?
nVidia isn't a resource-limited startup. They have a lot of smart people. They're obviously going to test the firmware against common workloads.
Regardless, don't buy a card unless you know it does what you want it to do. These cards are all mining-limited from day 1, so it's not like the performance will regress suddenly.
> They're obviously going to test the firmware against common workloads.
They can only test against pre-existing software. If they start penalizing uncommon workloads, this kills innovation in many areas, videogames included.
In one of my projects I'm using GPGPUs for complicated optimizations in CAM/CAE. I don't use any libraries/frameworks. From nVidia's point of views, my compute shaders are extremely uncommon workload. Unwanted too, because I skipped CUDA and their vendor lock-in.
> If they start penalizing uncommon workloads, this kills innovation in many areas, videogames included.
I'm not too worried about that. Nvidia has track record of releasing driver updates to address issues in end-user applications. If a legitimate application got accidentally flagged, people will report it and nvidia will whitelist them.
> people will report it and nvidia will whitelist them
That approach doesn’t work in general. Look at “Manage 3D settings / Program settings” in nVidia’s control panel. They only have presets for very popular software like Adobe After Effects or Premiere, benchmarks like 3D mark, or AAA videogames.
If you're in the market for a new card and you have the option of a powerful, purpose-built card that works out of the box or one that needs endless tweaking, few people would choose the more complex option. Especially if it means every new driver that gets released is going to require days to make work properly.
There's no "endless tweaking" to keep your GPU mining rig working.
Constant GPU driver updates are the norm for gaming GPUs because GPU drivers include a huge pile of workarounds for buggy games, and there are new buggy games hitting the market all the time. But if you just want to run a specific straightforward GPGPU task like a miner, you only need to get one driver version properly cracked to unlock full performance, and keep using that until the hardware is no longer profitable to mine with.
And it seems pretty likely that a countermeasure bolted on to the drivers this late in the process will be defeated fairly quickly, and miners will go on a second shopping spree after clearing out the stock of the new purpose-built mining cards. (Assuming those even ship before the 3060 drivers get cracked.)
Plus, part of the profitability of mining cards is being able to resell them once their profitability is low (and they do usually still work fine for gaming after a year of mining). The new mining cards will have to be insanely profitable to make them look better than the 30-series cards.
It all depends on availability - if there are no more CMP cards available, but GeForce cards are still around and there's a known good cracked driver for them, this won't even be a question.
Miners don't care about driver updates so it's really a one-off, not endless, once it's running they don't have to touch it.
But surely it's not like Nvidia is suddenly adding brand new capacity to produce these new cryptocurrency cards. If they could do that, they could just do that with the same cards to make enough for gamers and miners.
People are and still will be buying up every card that they can get their hands on at a price that turns an ROI of less than 6 months. They-ll just download a different driver/firmware if needed.
So true. Nvidia can't not know how resourceful cryptominers are - and to what lengths a miner will go to modify the firmware for even a few percentage point improvements. It'll just lead to a never-ending back and forth (will daily drivers become a thing?) until Nvidia decides it's not worth the effort.
This just seems like a feeble gesture at appeasing gamers. What's interesting is that these "mining-crippling" changes will only apply to the 3060 GPU, not the rest of the RTX 3000 series. If it was a legitimate gesture, then Nvidia would've made it universally applicable.
Hm, then I guess that given that this is a so far unreleased product (and assuming it's not supported in current drivers), Nvidia can at least sidestep the issue of miners just using an old driver version to get the hashing functionality back.
> This just seems like a feeble gesture at appeasing gamers.
Color me cynical, but this seems like a strong gesture at increasing margins on GPU computing by upselling using cryptocurrency and gamers as PR pawns/scapegoats
if Nvidia is selling more cards than they can produce/distribute at desired target prices they should produce more cards and improve their distribution networks..
Maybe it will offset the days it takes for a graphics card to pay itself by a few weeks? (e.g. previously RTX 3070 took x weeks to pay itself by mining 24/7, maybe it will change to x + 2 weeks?)
Pricing is 'only via suppliers' so we have no idea if CMP will be insanely cheaper or if it'll only be slightly cheaper. This most likely won't even solve the current shortages since 3060TIs, 3070s and 3080s will work with an old driver (existing drivers doesn't have any online auto-update, so they can't 100% force a new driver on cards), and the 3060 driver/firmware (some speculate the word 'driver' is inaccurate in the blog post and it'll be a firmware thing) might be hacked to bypass this limitation, so once it's hacked they will just always flash that firmware or use the modified driver.
They do. The 5700XT is still an excellent card, the 6700 and 6700XT are coming out soon, and the 6800 and 6800XT are both absolutely killer cards as well, especially at the reference prices.
Vendors and demand have effectively driven prices to an insane amount, and you just can't get them, unfortunately. Short of AMD doing something like Nvidia is doing here, I doubt we'll see them on store shelves any time soon.
AMD already did this. The RX6K series are terrible cards for mining. The radeon 7 smokes the new cards because the new ones where designed to be as bad at mining as possible without effecting raster performance.
RX 5700 will hit 55mhs and the RX6K series will do ~68mhs, but the cost of the 5700 is typically like half that of a 6800.
There's a reason it's easier to find the new AMD stuff in stock than nvidia stuff, they've got a terrible mining roi.
Vega 7 is a compute beast. The RX5xxx and RX6xxx are tuned for gaming performance and sacrifice unnecessary compute performance for better power efficiency.
No wonder the V7 is way better at mining.
And the reason you can't buy them is exactly the same reason nVidia is adding limitations - to try to make the cards less appealing to scalpers so the actual customers may get some.
But I'm concerned that a company can tell you what you can or can't do with your hardware.
Where is the spirit behind the hacker community, Jailbreaking iPhones, the right to repair, the ban of tattoos that prevented the use of Linux on PCs,...
That's a very concerning move from me.
Also, for a company that does morale :
(1) Nvidia's marketing is one of the best for making old products look obsolete and replaceable.
Most gamers would do great with their old gen card, they just don't need to upgrade already. But they reserve cards for them so that they can create as much e-waste as they want
(2) they could just have prevented supply issues if their supply chains were diverse and resilient. But it turns out they aren't. And it's not something that was asked by the gamers
(3) for a company that's focused around gamers, they have already prevented powerful "crypto" GPUs from being repurposed into gaming gear, as featured in LTT https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY4s35uULg4
I agree, but it should be noted that this isn't unusual for Nvidia: See Quadro Vs. Geforce. If you trick a system into thinking the Geforce GPU is a Quadro suddenly additional functionality/performance improvements unlock in the software/driver layer.
Yep, I have a old Geforce GPU with only VGA/DVI output just to use nView (although I had to modify it slightly). Such a weird thing, having a nice window manger for Windows but requiring non-technical people to buy an overpriced GPU to use it.
In Germany, NVIDIA quotes 519 € as the starting price for the RTX 3070 series. Unfortunately, the cards are sold out almost everywhere and the few sites that accept back-orders list them for almost 1.000 € now, which is crazy. So Kudos to them for doing this, as the crypto craze seems to heat up there's no end in sight for miners buying up GPUs and NVIDIA risks angering a lot of regular people that weren't able to buy a new graphics card for almost 6 months now.
That said I'm not sure how effective this measure will be as in my understanding all that miners need to do in order to circumvent this throttling is avoid downloading the newest NVIDIA drivers (?). In addition, I'm sure miners will quickly come up with a crack that renders the throttling moot, so not sure if this will fix the supply side. Offering specific hardware to miners that doesn't compete with that for gamers seems to be a better solution, but again if NVIDIA isn't able to satisfy the demand for such hardware miners will keep buying regular GPUs and try to circumvent the software throttling.
I'd rather they have scaled up the demand. They've had years of this to take the higher profits and invest them. Even if people don't use them for mining, the demand for Machine Learning is there - instead GeForce cards have been banned for use in data centers for years. Not to mention that the crippling of 3060 would be trivial for mining operations to get around.
There are car factories shutting down due to lack of chips. The silicon for the systems that I work on has its lead times increased from the customary <30 to 50 weeks. The supply issues is worldwide, for all fabless semiconductor issues.
How do you suggest they scale up demand short of building their own fabs? (Which I hope you aren't suggesting...)
Building more fabs is the only sustainable solution. Demand is higher than supply, and miners will just use older drivers or figure out a workaround pretty quickly, unless the new mining cards are substantially cheaper yet just as fast as the "gaming" GPUs.
Building more fabs is the general solution to the demand in silicon. And that's happening.
But in the context of "I'd rather they have scaled up the demand", where "they' is Nvidia (or almost any other fabless semiconductor company), it's not a solution because it's impossible for them to build fabs or to foresee and plan for the supply chain disruption that was caused by COVID-19.
>it's impossible for them to build fabs or to foresee and plan for the supply chain disruption that was caused by COVID-19.
This has been happening for half a decade, it is not remotely a COVID issue. And no, they can't build their own fabs but they can certainly invest (either directly or indirectly by securing larger orders at a higher price even more years in advance) all the premium so there's at more fabs at an earlier time.
While I hate the GPU shortage, I dont think this is the right way to go. Artificially limiting what you can and cannot do on your hardware is a bad precedent.
> Artificially limiting what you can and cannot do on your hardware is a bad precedent.
Unfortunately it happens all the time. For instance Nvidia had Quadro lineup, with nicer multi-display settings that to my knowledge was always just driver thing. They never ported those to GeForce line up, and people suffered with displays that wake up too late and all windows were messed up when you waked up your computer.
It hasn't happened to me lately so they might have fixed it, problem was that if one of the displays took longer to wake up then Windows didn't recognize it until it was too late. With Quadro you could force the EDI settings so that it faked for operating system that the display was there.
It's also a precedent nvidia (and AMD) set well over a decade ago by limiting several features to their quadro line. 5-10 years ago it was 10-12bit color. Today it's SR-IOV. There was also the gsync/freesync debacle not so long ago.
This is the first time the ends have even remotely justified the means.
>Artificially limiting what you can and cannot do on your hardware is a bad precedent.
Everything does it - from Intel chips being binned by performance, Windows versions and # of CPUs, and pretty much any big software products.
Another way to see it is: it costs X to develop a line, and a vendor can charge everyone the same, no matter how they use it, or they can design and partition the line so users with different needs pay more or less. So, for example, a home PC with 8 cores is not paying for software that handles 128 cores, and those needing 128 core software pay more. When Intel does a run of CPUs, and tests them, and finds some can run at 4 GHz, and others only at 3 GHz, then they can either throw out the 3GHz ones and charge everyone much, much more for the single sku, or they can partition the same chip into bins for different prices, effectively lowering the chip cost for every single sku.
The alternative to pricing in tiers is to charge the 128 core user less, and the 8 core user more, then the majority of users get charged more for things they will never use. Or only sell the top of the top of the chip yield, making the per unit cost astronomical, since now your yields dropped through the floor.
Personally, I like market segmentation, since it allows me to only pay for the things I want, while others can buy the things they want. I prefer not being charged to support development of things I don't want or need. And in some cases it lowers the cost for everyone.
Binning chips for yield is different from artificially crippling chips. There's nothing wrong with taking an 8-core CPU with a defect in one core and selling it as a 6-core part, or underclocking it until all 8 cores are stable and selling it as a slower part. The odious part happens when fab defect rates drop and yield improves, so basically all the dies can function as 8-core chips. When that happens, Intel et al. start disabling perfectly functional cores to artificially constrain the supply of high-end parts. That's a pretty clear cut market failure that's only possible because the barriers to entry are so high.
The most extreme instance of this that I'm aware of was when Intel sold a ~$50 piece of software that would unlock the rest of the L2 cache on a specific low-end processor model. They didn't say it might work on your chip; every instance of that model had apparently passed QA with the full cache enabled but shipped with a fourth of it (IIRC) disabled. So Intel wasn't saving any money or harvesting any otherwise-unusable parts with that model. They were just price fixing.
Product segmentation for software is also a different issue, because all the scarcity is artificial to begin with, with no natural underlying supply curves because there's no marginal cost to making another copy.
> Product segmentation for software is also a different issue, because all the scarcity is artificial to begin with, with no natural underlying supply curves because there's no marginal cost to making another copy.
What you're saying is that due to some irrelevant production related factor, it's totally fine for a software company to price their product based on what the market is willing to pay, but as soon as a piece of hardware is involved, that principle doesn't apply anymore.
What about selling software that comes with a hardware copyright protection dongle? Under which category does that fall? The marginal cost of producing that dongle is not zero after all.
> What you're saying is that due to some irrelevant production related factor, it's totally fine for a software company to price their product based on what the market is willing to pay,
I didn't say it's fine. It's off-topic, because it's a different issue with fundamentally different economic forces at play.
Marginal cost is not the only cost. It's disingenuous to treat it as such. It's also incorrect - making a copy for someone to access is most certainly not free.
And the economics is sound - partitioning markets allows sales at lower prices to many purchasers. There's simply no way around this, no matter how you feel about it.
>That's a pretty clear cut market failure
No, the same economics above apply - partitioning the market lets those less needs obtain product at a lower cost than those with more needs, no matter how the device/software is created.
Market segmentation replaces a single, ham handed consumer and producer surplus with a multi level one, allowing each side to capture more of the surplus for their benefit, leaving less of the summed surplus on the table.
Not every purchaser has the same surplus to trade. By splitting the market some purchasers that would not otherwise buy are now willing and able to do so, and the tighter or possible non-existent margins there are offset by selling to those accepting higher price points, almost always offset by extra capability.
And no matter how you slice it, commodity chips and software are so incredibly cheap compared to the value they provide it's hard to claim these prices are somehow not reasonable. For less than a week's pay I can purchase an incredible set of tools that I can then turn into orders of magnitude more value for me. Pretty much any professional making a living based on computers is in the same position.
> Marginal cost is not the only cost. It's disingenuous to treat it as such.
Well, it's a good thing I didn't do that. I just said that the lack of any real marginal cost means that artificial market segmentation for software should be analyzed separately from artificial market segmentation for physical goods. And only one of those two analyses is relevant to this thread. The software stuff you brought up is a red herring.
>that artificial market segmentation for software should be analyzed separately from artificial market segmentation for physical goods
This is akin to economic voodoo. There is no reason to do anything different for either one - they are products, customers buy them.
Once you want this artificial split, I guess based on your (incorrect) claim that there is no marginal cost (original claim) or lack of any real marginal cost (backpedaled claim) as the deciding factor, then when do you start to add a continuum of how you analyze based on a continuum of costs?
If there is a marginal cost 3/4 between your two cases, do we now need to interpolate your forms of analysis? All because you personally don't like how markets work?
Or why not simply use the same method, standard economics, to analyze them? And realize all these products have the same benefits to consumers via varied pricing?
>The software stuff you brought up is a red herring.
No, it shows how markets work. That you move your goalposts in the middle of a thread is the fallacious reasoning.
And you've failed to address that segmentation like this allows people to buy that could not have otherwise. Do you dispute that segmentation allows cheaper pricing for some consumers, and in some products, all consumers? Are you arguing for higher prices or just ignoring this empirical fact?
> That's a pretty clear cut market failure that's only possible because the barriers to entry are so high.
I see that as a market success. People with lighter needs can purchase a neutered chip at a lower price. While people with greater needs can purchase an unlocked chip for a premium.
An alternative is to only have one chip, which is priced higher than the neutered version. Because of lost sales, fewer people overall buy the chip, so the price per unit goes up. This is a net loss to the consumer.
Another idea is to build two chips for each market. This increases design and production costs. And is a net loss for the consumer.
Or they could always just avoid making the more powerful chip at all, and stick with the volume seller.
This is a really common strategy in consumer products because it makes so much market sense. It sounds unfair when you think of it as, "paying for a product which you can't access the full potential". But it sounds pretty nice when you frame it as, "getting a discount for not using a feature."
It's a market failure because in a market with proper competition it wouldn't be possible for Intel to do this without being undercut by someone else on the higher end parts.
If you're able to take e.g. an 8 core cpu, artificially disable 2 of the cores and sell the 8 core for $300 and the 6 core for $250, and still make a profit/break even on both of them then you could be selling the 8 core for $250 and your competition should be punishing you.
Intel are only able to offer a "discount" because their profit margins are so high because of lack of competition.
> sell the 8 core for $300 and the 6 core for $250, and still make a profit/break even on both of them then you could be selling the 8 core for $250 and your competition should be
It doesn't work that way. The $300 premium chips are where all of the margin is, and is what finances the whole operation. If they production costs of in your hypothetical chips is $235, then Intel would be making $15 on the cheap chips, but $65 on the premium ones. Which means that one premium chip is worth the 4.3x the margin of a cheap one.
Losing that premium segment is a big deal. Even if it is only 10% of the volume, because margins are so high, it ends up being like 40% of profits.
This isn't new. Just about every consumer goods market works like that, from peanut butter to cars. You need the middle tier to have enough volume to minimize production costs, but you need to find that premium offering to actually make money.
If your production cost is $235, then you need to make $235 to finance your operation. Anything more is inefficiency that competitors in a healthy market would eat away at.
Then there must not exist any markets that meet your definition of healthy, because basically every mature market works like I described. It's the most efficient strategy for minimizing costs and maximizing profits.
A fundamental principal of business is that a successful one needs to earn a profit. And that profit needs to be high enough to continue operation.
Indeed there are no theoretically perfect free markets. I'm just arguing that Intel is getting away with a lot more than they would if they had competition more like other businesses; as opposed to the current situation where they only have to compete against AMD, and own enough patents between the two of them that it's basically impossible for new competitors to enter the market.
No business needs to earn a profit. By definition profit is surplus to operating costs (and I include a reasonable emergency fund in the category of "operating costs").
Off topic but does Tesla still software limit their batteries? I always cringed at that; just knowing something exists that isn't being used to it's full potential
I wonder how much of this is Nvidia getting pressure from the Gaming industry to do something about it. As far as Nvidia is concerned they are selling as many units as they can produce, so it is a gold rush for them. The gaming industry I am sure is getting concerned that for their new AAA titles already under development which require these high end GPUs, their customers won’t be able to get ahold of them. Or at least will be unwilling to pay the huge markups that the cards are going for.
> As far as Nvidia is concerned they are selling as many units as they can produce, so it is a gold rush for them.
It actually is not, because those cards sold to miners don't just magically vanish, when crypto prices finally fall the miners will flood the market and the prices for new cards will have to be depressed as a result.
Mining sales should largely be thought of as a "pull-forward", they represent revenue that you're not going to make in some future quarter when everyone is buying used miner cards for 40% under MSRP. And NVIDIA themselves don't crank the chip price for OEMs (all of that was locked in a year ago) so they aren't making more money in the short term to make up for it.
That is specifically what NVIDIA is trying to address here by banning mining on gaming cards and creating mining-specific cards that can't be gamed on. Now cards that are sold for mining can't flood back and hit their future revenue in the gaming market.
It seems that most people have forgotten what it was like at the end of the mining craze and GPUs were plentiful, or that they've tried this tactic before (without the aggressive artificial restrictions).
Will they really require these gpus though? In my experience you can play virtually everything on a 4-5 year old card on some level of provided graphics settings.
IMO people obsess far too much on turning games up to the top setting when the actual result is hardly different, and certainly not worth buying a top card yearly for.
I suspect this is good point. Many light-mid gamers want to buy a new console or jump into a gaming PC, and both are in shortage. Selling gaming PC in this timing is important.
I think people are missing the fact that the 3060 that NVIDIA is halving the hash rate on is not yet released. It is expected at the end of this month and different than the already-in-market 3060 Ti.
The 3060 Ti was already NVIDIA's mining efficiency leader (per W and per $). I think the 3060 would be in the same ballpark, if not better, which I assume is why NVIDIA is doing this.
Presumably they will do nothing to the existing cards (in part because it would solve very little if you could just use old drivers to get the unthrottled MH/s).
A lot of comments are referring to hardware freedom to run what you want but I don't see anywhere in the article saying that you can't run whatever you want to on this hardware. It's just going to pretend to be slower hardware, not cut off capabilities. It seems entirely within Nvidia's moral rights to release a product that is not the best possible of all conceivable products; that's literally the point of the budget gpus anyway!
The behavior on display in this thread is highly reminiscent of the behavior of people demanding that open source authors do free work for them.
It’s baffling. Almost like people do like both to complain and to not have nice things. I bet that a huge part of them don’t do neither of ML, mining, nor free software at all. The naked fact that a mid-tier card already costs half a decent car escapes their reasoning somehow.
The issue seems to be that it's the driver doing the halving, not the hardware itself, which is a little odd. Given the large profitability, anyone who actually buys 3060's for mining will hack the driver/pay for a hacked driver that removes this limitation.
> RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent.
It's nice that Nvidia gets to artificially restrict what I can do with their products after I buy them. I had this problem years ago...I bought a USB video adapter to enable using a second screen while my main screen was running games...they had code in the driver to disable things like physx if a second display was detected.
Ok, but it is not taking away something that you bought or anything. The specifications are known up front. You can choose not to buy something if you don't like the software on it.
> Ok, but it is not taking away something that you bought or anything.
Yes, it is. The hardware has capabilities, and Nvidia is artificially limiting them in certain circumstances based on what they consider "acceptable" use.
They are taking away my choice to use the hardware as I see fit. And are granting themselves the ability to alter the value of my purchase after the fact. What's to stop them from deciding to update the driver in 3 months to cut the hash rate to 25%? Sony did this with the PS3 when they retroactively removed the OtherOS capability years after purchase. They were sued over this and ultimately settled.
> They are taking away my choice to use the hardware as I see fit.
No, they are simply selling you a product that you are voluntarily choosing to buy. You are perfectly within your right to not purchase something that you don't want.
> And are granting themselves the ability to alter the value of my purchase after the fact.
False. You seem to be unaware of whats going on. All of this stuff is being told to you ahead of time. Your software is not being modified after the fact.
You are simply buying a product, that comes pre-installed with certain software. If you don't like the software that is installed, up front, beforehand, then don't buy it.
Nothing is being modified after the fact.
> What's to stop them from deciding to update the driver
Thats not what happened. No updates are out. Instead, this is about new hardware, that has not been sold to anyone yet. Nothing is being updated.
> they were sued over this and ultimately settled.
Well then it is a good thing that nothing is being modified after it was purchased then isn't it? This only applies to unreleased products, that you have the choice of not buying.
> No, they are simply selling you a product that you are voluntarily choosing to buy. You are perfectly within your right to not purchase something that you don't want.
No, they are imposing restrictions on use after it's purchased.
> False. You seem to be unaware of whats going on.
You seem to be deliberately misrepresenting the argument. No one is claiming that this has actually occurred yet with this product. However, this is their stated policy, that they will artificially restrict what owners of the product can do via software drivers. Since it's via drivers, they can update them to further modify the capabilities of the devices after purchase. They have already done this in the past, when they modified drivers to disable capabilities if they detected more than one display adapter present (also to try to limit use in crypto mining).
> Thats not what happened. No updates are out. Instead, this is about new hardware, that has not been sold to anyone yet. Nothing is being updated.
No one is claiming this is currently happening. But they have a history of trying to control what people do with their hardware after it's been released and sold.
So nothing has been updated YET.
> This only applies to unreleased products, that you have the choice of not buying.
Yes, it's good they're announcing their intention to change the functionality of devices after they've been purchased.
> No, they are imposing restrictions on use after it's purchased.
No they do not! Nobody has any 3060s yet! The cards become pre-installed with this software. If you don't like this software, don't buy the card. It is not an update! It is pre-installed software that you can choose not to buy.
> No one is claiming that this has actually occurred yet with this product.
So then you agree that nothing has been changed after the fact. Got it, that is my point. The cards are not sold yet. And you are being told, ahead of time what software is on those cards.
If you don't like that software, don't buy it.
> they can update them to further modify the capabilities of the devices after purchase.
Nothing has been updated on these specific cards after the fact. The cards are not sold yet. This is just about unsold devices, that you can choose to buy or not buy.
> No one is claiming this is currently happening.
So then you agree that your device has not been limited after the fact, and that the drivers are pre-installed? Got it. Thats my point.
> their intention to change the functionality
No. It is pre-installed software, that comes on a device, before you purchase it.
> No they do not! Nobody has any 3060s yet! The cards become pre-installed with this software. If you don't like this software, don't buy the card. It is not an update! It is pre-installed software that you can choose not to buy.
The cards do not come preinstalled with drivers. Drivers are installed in the OS and are updated regularly while the hardware is in support.
You have a very odd obsession with future/past here. These are statements that Nvidia has made about their plans for this hardware. Unless they change their mind, they will do this. It doesn't matter that it hasn't actually happened yet, it's their stated policy for these cards, as well as something they've done in the past without warning. And even if you buy the card knowing that the hash rate is restricted, there are a myriad other uses that they can now arbitrarily restrict at their whim.
> No. It is pre-installed software, that comes on a device, before you purchase it.
No, it's software you install separately. Since the drivers are required to have the card function, you must install them, and they can be updated at will by the manufacturer to remove capabilities.
When you are buying this kind of hardware, you primarily look at the hardware specs to understand the capabilities. In this case, those specs can't be trusted, because Nvidia is deciding what sort of code you're allowed to run on hardware you've purchased.
> And even if you buy the card knowing that the hash rate is restricted, there are a myriad other uses that they can now arbitrarily restrict at their whim.
But this isn't about you being sold something, and then it being change later.
Instead, you are being sold something, knowing full well what software is available.
> Drivers are installed in the OS and are updated regularly while the hardware is in support.
I have misphrased things then. What I should have said, is that you are being sold these cards, and you know ahead of time, that it is only this software that is available.
That is very different from buying something, under the expectation that other software, that has already been released, can do certain things, and then that software changing.
You know full well what software is going to be available, and you voluntarily choose to buy it, given that knowledge.
That is extremely different than if I bought something, and was given software X, and then that software X turned into software Y later on.
> Instead, you are being sold something, knowing full well what software is available.
Not really. Even if I buy a card and am content to live with the 50% reduction in hash rate (assuming that's why I wanted to buy it), Nvidia still has the ability to change the drivers and further restrict the hash rate at their whim.
> That is extremely different than if I bought something, and was given software X, and then that software X turned into software Y later on.
The problem is that we can't know if Software X will turn into Software Y later on. If I buy a card because it has certain specs, I expect to be able to exercise those capabilities. I don't think Nvidia should be able to try to restrict what I choose to do with those capabilities.
Nvidia uses boot-chain security to prohibit third-party drivers from using their GPUs - if you don't use Nvidia's own power-management blob, the card will lock itself to the lowest thermal bucket and highest fan speed until you reset it. It's arguably why they're able to segment their GPUs by application so effectively.
I'm a miner (7x3070, 2x3080, 1x3090) and I support this nerf. The reason is because I am also a gamer, and it's always regrettable that cryptocurrency mining has made gaming cards out of reach.
Out of curiosity how did you get those cards? Did you manage to buy them at retail or is the economics such that the miners are willing to pay the scalper premium?
Honest question: Have you calculated your profits now VS what your profits would have been if those same $$ purchased the cryptocurrency of your choice on the day you bought the cards instead? Which would have been more profitable (taking selling the equipment after into consideration as well).
I did this kind of calculation during the 2017 bubble. It mostly depends on the future price of the cryptocurrency. From my calculations mining was less risk for less reward compared to purchasing the crypto directly.
(5) With this action I expect its only the little guys getting removed from the game here (1) a huge benefit for the big players (2)(3) benefitting the corporations biggest customers (4)
When GPUs are know to use signed firmware, when open source coders need to ask for signed firmware to make even a minimal feature open source GPU driver work, and when there’s no evidence at all that high performance custom made mining-only drivers exist, then that seems very far fetched to me.
Assuming binning is simply making use of chips that fail display output tests but are otherwise fine, then I see no issue here. These are chips not being used by gamers anyway.
I am curious though whether they could be used as "second cards" for systems so that I can speed up Blender render times...
It seems like manufacturers are now resorting to artificial means to curb demand, rather than increasing supply.
What are the practical reasons supply hasn’t kept up? Obviously, a fab is expensive but they have to be just printing money with these things in the current market. This really goes across the board with semiconductors as CPU supply issues are outrageous right now as well. Why aren’t more fabs being built? Is this just plain and simple greed?
It's a real shame that companies think that they should be the ones dictating how you use a piece of hardware you bought from them.
It's a further shame that they would artificially hinder their hardware for such purposes.
I will avoid nvidia in the future as a result of this sort of attitude, and I don't even mine cryptocurrency. I have no dog in this race other than a philosophical one.
Nvidia is in a "tough" spot. If they increased GPU prices to take advantage of miner demand, they could be rich but lose the gaming segment. If they keep the price accessible for gaming, then they end up dealing with scalpers and low availability which, fair or not, impacts their brand. This is really an attempt to get the miners to buy something else so they can have both market segments.
Segmentation has always left a bad taste in my mouth. I had to buy my 3090 (for gaming and video production) secondhand NIB because nvidia was playing dumb with prices.
No. They (nvidia or someone else) should be building tons and tons of cards for the existing demand. I just cant understand why isnt someone salivating at such market inefficiency.
They did exactly that just 3 years ago when bitcoin was hot, and (when bitcoin crashed) ended up with an oversupply of GTX cards that delayed Turing sales and tanked the stock for a while. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-cryptocurrency-earn...
Doesn't really make sense to blame Turing's sales on this when it was also a pretty bad generation in general (price hikes, poor performance, RTX gimmick turned out to be a flop).
A thought just occurred to me: is there an upper limit to how much computing power (and energy) cryptocurrency mining can reasonably use? Or could all computer hardware be repurposed to mine crypto and there would still be demand for more hardware?
There is no "crypto tax", just supply and demand. I recently bought a NIB 3090 (secondhand, because nvidia are in denial of reality apparently) for gaming and video production.
it is annoying they limit their drivers this way but ultimately this is in response to their core customers' frustrations. Nvidia is trying to segment their products so that the video game market can get their cards without dealing with the boom and bust cycle of cryptomining.
I somehow doubt these drivers will be enough to stop it, however.
Dealers resell with a small margin hoping there's enough demand for them to turn a profit. Scalpers aggressively create demand by buying every single card on the market and then reselling at an enormous, many times the original cost, markup. There is a huge difference.
I've been helping keep my bedroom warm each night this week by mining ethereum on my RTX 2070 - made about $6 net so far. The fact that I'm benefiting from the waste heat literally helps me sleep at night.
You'd think so, but that's not the case. Electricity is only running me around 7 cents / kWh, so when I say "net" I mean it. Ethereum is up 7x over the last year, and is largely driving the surge in GPU prices - if it weren't currently profitable, nobody would be buying modern GPUs for mining it.
Regardless, even if I were losing money, 100% of the waste heat from my computer is doing actual useful work in heating my room. No electric space heater would be more energy efficient at that, although it would be quieter and put out more heat per unit area.
That's definitely true, but would be a significant additional cost. I'm just supplementing the gas furnace, which is controlled by a single thermostat. I could bump up the temperature for the whole house, but my room just happens to be particularly drafty, with 3 older bay windows which need to be replaced.
Electricity to heat conversion is 100% efficient by definition (entropy), so it’s theoretically no worse than if OP bought a plug in electric heater afaik.
I use CUDA for scientific calculations and I wonder how this will affect GPU performance since any detection algorithm may have fault positives. The only problem with such artificial limitation is that usually people who mine crypto are very inventive (if you have doubts about that just check laptop mining farms [1]), since they try to squeeze out as many H/s as possible. It is just a matter of time when the 'right' driver will be available.
> since any detection algorithm may have fault positives
Though not impossible, NVIDIA has been doing application detection for ages for the purpose of tuning the performance of the latest popular games. So as long as your scientific calculations don't calculate too much Keccak-256 hashes, they should probably be fine.
Their application detection is based on executable name. Fairly popular game I worked on was misdetected because apparently we used executable name of some decade old FPS. They fixed it in NVidia Control Panel, but Shadowplay continues to put gameplay recordings in wrong folder to this day.
They might doing the same thing video games do to combat piracy.
No DRM is unbreakable, all games are eventually cracked, so why bother?
The thought is that it buys enough time during the critical launch window to sway people who will have pirated the game to buy a copy instead.
The case for this kind of video card "DRM" is actually stronger because miners either have to gamble and buy cards they know they won't be able to use until (or even if) a "crack" is available, or wait until a solution is available before buying them.
If the miners wait, this is a win for gamers and Nvidia PR because the cards will be bought by gamers since cards have a limited supply unlike video game licenses.
I'm sure someone raised that objection internally, and was pointedly ignored (as they should be if all you care about is the PR angle of "we're doing something"!)
You're right, I forgot they package up drivers for all cards in the same versioning scheme, so using 4XX version of the package won't support the card.
Personally I am very very VERY much okay with this. This will keep consumer cards in correct demand. And if miners want to throw away money for mining, they can.
People talking of modding, its a high effort and high risk. Again, I'm okay with that. The cost of modding will likely be the same as just buying a specialized card. Overall mining is a horrible environmental impact.
This doesn’t change anything, as the additional yield by reusing binned chips is not enough to meet inelastic demand from miners. They will buy anything
Neither a gamer nor a miner but would love some perspective here because something about this doesn't make sense to me.
If Nvidia has the capability to make a differentiated mining product, shouldn't that be enough to get miners to go for it? Why halve the hashing rate on the "gaming" GPU artificially? If it is a supply issue, shouldn't Nvidia, as a company, try and solve for it directly (maybe it is really hard?), instead of making their products unattractive to a certain set of customers?
From a miner's perspective there's little incentive (in cost difference) to get a mining specific card that doesn't hold its value when the mining craze is over compared to a general card which can be sold on the seccond hand market if necessary.
The same criticisms were given last time nividia tried to make a mining card and obviously it didn't work as last time they didn't need to use artificial limits.
Algorithms that are still protifable mine on GPUs were designed with ASIC resiliency in mind - they use memory hard algorithms.
This makes the problem of designing specialised mining cards equivalent to designing fast and efficient DRAM, an area where the consumer product is the cutting edge. This was by design to reduce hashrate centralisation.
Even the latest ethereum ASICs are only 10% more efficient, cost much more and can only mine ethash and its variants.
So as it stands I see no evidence that suggests mining cards will be cheaper with better efficiency, especially when the cryptocurrency community slowly moving away from mining.
GPU supply is a huge problem, but this is a massively problematic solution. It likely won't even work; if it can be done w/ firmware, it will be reversed by firmware patches. I've been all through GPU firmware flashes in a quest to get both NVIDIA and AMD cards passed through to VMs w/ QEMU on Unraid, and I feel like this could be easily circumvented based on that experience.
Buying gamer GPU allows to sale it later, when crypto bubble pops up. Buying specialized hardware makes it useless later. Prices (and availability) for specialized hardware must be really sweet to satisfy miners.
This move is not going to change anything. The Mining demand is more or less inelastic as long as it's profitable. Many of the major miners have power and space to basically expand with as many cards as they can get their hands on. So this card is just going to accelerate their expansion.
there’s going to be a brisk market in reverse engineering the drivers and getting around this
“RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent.”
If it is not physically possible, this decision makes a lot of sense. Due to the global semiconductor shortage it simply is not possible to build more on the scale customers would like to.
The instrument to regulate that is called the price. You increase the price until there is a steady supply. That would help funding new fabs and in the long run increase the supply so that it could be available for a broader range of consumers. The way they do it is not sustainable. They will not generate enough money to pay for new manufacturing plants this way.
That’s on the order of years for this problem. I would imagine that Nvidia doesn’t think it could survive the reputational costs of charging market clearing prices for their cards for years - effectively proscribing their core gamer market for the entire period.
Sure, that’s what’s happening now, but it’s the fault of scalpers not a business decision by Nvidia. The scalpers get the ire of the core market, and Nvidia gets to look like it’s doing its best (while guaranteeing all the inventory it can make will sell)
It’s the same reason your favorite band charges a low face for tickets that doesn’t reflect demand - they don’t want to be the bad guy excluding poor people from the experience, they just let the scalpers do that.
So they essentially got themselves in a pickle. It looks like they have not invested money in infrastructure and instead lowered prices to attract as many people as possible thinking what they currently have will be "enough". They have not predicted that the demand will be so high that it will exceed their current abilities and they have no money to increase the production and they are unable to raise the money without destroying the market they built. That they want to give the experience to the "poor" people it is just a poor excuse of poor management.
I think Nvidia could borrow or raise basically any amount of money if they had capital-intensive projects to invest in that would solve current or future supply constraints. Retained earnings are not the only way a company can invest in itself.
The problem isn't capital, its fundamental inelasticity of supply for semiconductors. Fabs (or capacity in fabs) can't be spun up or down quickly, nevermind cheaply.
The problem is capital. Building your own fab is not something you can casually get funding for - there is a lot of risk and you looking for at least a decade before you could see any returns, if it succeeds at all - and you need to have the right money to get people who know this stuff and those people are scarce.
Right - so it makes sense that Nvidia wouldn’t do that, and instead pass that risk off, diversify across multiple vendors, and return earnings to their investors as dividend and buyback? And that the supply crunch is the result of global simultaneous supply and demand shocks that couldn’t have been foreseen in the timeframes required for them to have made investments to alleviate it, and aren’t likely to be repeated?
Technocally, the proper tool is "max units per buyer".
People who insist that prices are the only control point tend to be those most unfamiliar with the practical dimension of finite resource distribution.
> RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent.
Its an opportunity for someone to hack the drivers
Business opportunity because other miners will pay for the driver (or the mining software you make has the 2% mining fee to your address) or you can be the only one that has the driver and buys up all the rtx cards yourself if you have access to capital
vertically integrated is harder of course but could have the biggest payoff
I know how I'd do it but nobody paying me to do it so it's not really tractable for the time being. Is the mining payout actually attractive? I thought people were still running at a loss.
These realities change every minute and most mining calculators are super wrong.
For example, for Ethereum, mining calculators assume the block reward of 2 Eth, but for the past year each block has had like 5 Eth on average because the transaction fees are so high, extended periods of time with 7-10 Eth per block. So its double and triple the estimated payout if you are just taking a passing look.
> Any clue if they'll get rid of the restrictions once supply catches up to demand?
Now that is a great question. If they were purely doing this for their supply issues and not for control they would be stating that this is just temporary.
> RTX 3060 software drivers are
> designed to detect specific
> attributes of the Ethereum
> cryptocurrency mining algorithm,
> and limit the hash rate, or
> cryptocurrency mining
> efficiency, by around 50
> percent.
I have no interest in crypto, but hacking around this restriction sounds fun. I think announcing this publicly was a mistake. There are a lot of people who'l take this as a challenge, especially if these cards are easier to purchase. I expect hacked drivers in weeks, if not days.
As I wrote in the other thread here, this won’t change anything. The additional chips which were previously binned probably don’t exceed demand. The demand of miners is inelastic and they will buy anything.
It would be fantastic if mining activity could be detected at the hardware level in order to engage throttling. Honestly if cryptocurrencies are going to be a thing, it wouldn't make any sense for hardware makers to ever sell anything that could be used for mining. They could just build their own mining equipment, own the market, and not sell (or sell at a prohibitive markup) any hardware that makes serious mining profitable.
I'm saying this as a person who wants to use computers for something useful, like playing games.
no because they can more money annually selling cards than mining, beside investors don't put in money in nvidia because it engages in crypto but because it's a video card company.
Saying they can make more money selling the cards doesn't make sense if the cards are actually profitable to use as mining equipment. Plus, investors don't care if nvidia is a video card company or they sell toilet paper, they care about their performance as an investment. If nvidia could pivot and double your investment, would you really care what they were pivoting to?
Nividia can't just suddenly decide to keep cards for themselves for mining, they have pre arranged agreements to fulfil with their partners.
Pivoting and creating a mining division also doesn't make sense - mining companies take on a lot more risk from volatile market prices and need to have a lot more cash on hand to sustain the long periods of unprofitability.
Sure, I'm not saying nvidia would just decide to stop shipping tomorrow. However, if crypto is really viable and long-term profitable, it wouldn't make a ton of sense for them to give their potential competitors (e.g. anyone else who wants to mine) capital equipment at what would amount to a loss.
They could subcontract the operation of the mining equipment to third parties so they make a profit immediately selling the mining hardware, and skim as much mining profit as possible while their subcontractors assume all the risk.
(Just using nvidia as an example, but this model would work well for anyone making hardware that's capable of mining at scale).
> if crypto [mining] is really viable and long-term profitable
This is still a big if, with the most profitable gpu mining crypto moving to proof of stake in the next few years it's unclear if gpu mining will be as viable.
and yes investor care a lot about how the company makes money, if i'm buying nvidia i've certain risk/profit profile in mind. And if that said company suddenly decides to invest all of its assets on riskier industry than that means i'm in more risk, more risk than what was my investment plan. Depending on my age and total amount of wealth my risk tolerance would be very different.
I find it somewhat amusing that you use playing games as an example of something useful compared to performing ethereum transactions.
What you suggest already happens, companies like Bitmain who can invest millions to develop custom asic designs and buy directly from the silicon manufactures, contributing to the silicon shortage. Miners are buying commercial hardware becuase the allocation at the factories doesn't meet their demand, if it did graphics cards would just be sold at higher MSRPs.
> I find it somewhat amusing that you use playing games as an example of something useful compared to performing ethereum transactions.
I mean, imho most people are using cryto as an extremely complicated casino, and it's not even that fun. At least games are honest about their purpose as a form of entertainment and singularly focused on that.
Nvidia should partner with Steam. Steam has enough meta-data on user accounts to be able to offer a level of certainty about how accurate and authentic a given account and it's user information is. You could then use a trusted enough Steam account as a one-per-customer method to sell a card to.
You wouldn't have to monkey around with hardware freedom and even if a person decides to re-sell it at least it had the chance of being used by a "real gamer" first.
ASICs requite a lot of up front capital to design and manufacture. ASICs also only really matter when prices are low and performance/watt matters. There's also limited supply too.
The popular gpu algorithm is ethereum, who's heading algorithm (ethash) is memory hard, so muhh of the performance relies on the speed of commercial DRAM chips so the difference between ASICs and GPUs are not as great. Along with the lower incentive as ethereum plans to move to proof of stake ASICs for ethereum are not as popular or common.
Some cryptocurrencies use ASIC resistant algorithms for PoW. This helps decentralize the miners. Since a lot of people and gamers already have GPUs they can get right into mining without having to order any custom hardware.
EDIT: nevermind, I didn't realize the 3060 wasn't out yet. In that case, I think this is a good move (if it actually works).
Disregard everything below...
I hate mining, I love my (old-ish) Nvidia GPU, and what this will do for the availability of cards and reliability of cards on the second-hand market is great.
But, FUCK this. Nvidia just removed a feature from a product customers paid for, and then sold it back to them in a new product. This is like if Apple disabled Wifi on old iPhones to force you to buy a new one.
It doesn't matter whether the reasoning behind this particular decision is something you agree with, a company should not be allowed to get away with doing something like this.
I hope a class action lawsuit comes out of this and Nvidia loses big, because a world where a company can do this by adding sufficient spin to the decision, is terrible for consumers.
If NVIDIA feels the need to gimp the upcoming RTX 3060, that suggests that the new CMP cards will not be attractive enough to compete on their own price/merit, or that they will be similarly supply constrained. That said, I'm curious to see how they perform for machine learning.
I've been trying to get a 3000 series card for months. I could have just settled for an AMD, but I want use the hardware for more than gaming. I'll still be buying an Nvidia GPU, but definitely not this one.
Aren't ASIC miners at least an order (or in the case of Bitcoin, several orders) of magnitude more efficient than these chips? Is this just more attractive in terms of more easily accessible supply?
ASICs are great for Bitcoin because B’s algo strains the math features of a chip. An ASIC can bake a whole iteration of the algo into a single, huge instruction.
Many people in the community don’t like ASICs in crypto because they believe their high cost and rarity creates a hurdle for mass adoption. Every kid playing games on their computer has a GPU, but it’s much harder for that same kid to get their hands in an ASIC. Mass adoption by all kinds of people, not just already rich corporations, is important to the security and the mission of crypto.
In response, Ethereum was designed to have an algo that stresses your RAM rather than your processor. This reduces the advantage of ASICs tremendously. You can’t drive RAM much harder than GPUs already do. And so, Eth and many other memory-hard cryptos are still mined on GPUs.
I suspect they're listing maximum power draw and not mining power draw like their other cards, otherwise they'll also be outer performed by their normal cards if properly optimised.
There are ASICs for Bitcoin and other coins that use SHA. Ethereum and other "later" cryptocurrencies using hashing algorithms that are memory-hard and there aren't efficient ASICs for those. If you're mining Ethereum or ZCash or something, you're using GPUs
those who bought 3090/3080 five months ago can probably sell their GPU cards at the original purchase price. you will never be able to do that for those ASIC based devices.
Hard to say because no-one had an opportunity to benchmark RTX 3060. Theoretically I'd be mostly worried about everything related to huge amounts hashing (eg. bruteforcing password hashes).
I am wondering when miners are going to jump on PS5 consoles. Latest PS4 webkit exploit works on those so you can run non signed code, and GPU is supposed to be very fast.
> We’re limiting the hash rate of GeForce RTX 3060 GPUs so they’re less desirable to miners and launching NVIDIA CMP for professional mining.
Limiting to justify a new product. Like they do to fp64 rates and virtualization support.
>RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent.
Nice, one more reason to get the open source driver moving.
They might be under a lot of economic pressure to do this. After all, if one of the premier manufacturers of gaming GPUs can't get their product into the hands of gamers, the game industry as a whole will certainly suffer. Imagine the extreme scenario where large studios develop and release their next gen AAA titles only to find out no one's buying them because they can't find any GPUs to run them on.
Releasing dedicated hardware for mining cryptocurrencies is the only way to go forward. Miners that use gaming hardware to mine must just be priced out of the market by more efficient dedicated hardware.
This happened for bitcoin. If you don't have latest ASIC you can't even dream of mining bitcoin unless your electricity costs nothing.
And even then you are still better off investing in ASIC as opposed to gaming hardware.
That wouldn't solve the fundamental issue of supply and demand during a mining craze.
Mining crazes appear quickly and dissappear quickly leaving little opportunity for the much slower silicon pipeline to catch up. The demand for cryptocurrency ASICs in the last mining boom was much higher than the production.
Thus even if they could meet demand that would just result in less allocation to gaming hardware.
The reason it has been successful for bitcoin is becuase sha256 utilises only half of the gpu whereas memory hard algorithms like ethash utilise almost all of it. Designing a specialised, power efficient ASIC only matters when the return isn't ludicrous.
During mining bubbles it makes a lot more sense for miners to purchase general hardware to use during the craze and sell afterwards. Until these bubbles aren't as crazy that's not going to dissappear.
Wonderful. Maybe we could reuse Ethereum ASICs for AI.
The fact that people waste electricity gaming drove the development of GPUs that serve researchers. Maybe more general mining software will end up cheaply in hands of scientists as well?
A chip that is good at general parallel computing is a good as an ethereum mining.
A chip thst is good at ethereum mining doesn't necessarily have to be good at general parallel computing.
Clearly the solution for everyone is to either make a popular computer game that matches the signature of cryptocurrency mining, or develop a cryptocurrency that is mined by beating computer games that require high quality and frame rates to maximize the mining rate.
The graphic card manufacturers would, of course, have to optimize their hardware and software for these situations, to make the gamers happy.
Gamers want to spend $500 on a GPU, whereas miners want to spend $1000 on a GPU. It makes sense that NVIDIA would have two offerings. Crypto may for the most part move on from non-GPU intensive methods, but gamers will almost always be looking for the cutting edge, so it would be wise to be able to continue to be competitive with the gaming market.
Quote: "RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent."
So, a software solution to a hardware issue? Well, this is going to work exactly like expected. Can somebody spell "cracked games"?
They simply started a capture the flag competition where the flag is the ability to use cheaper (decreased hash power will reduce price generally) and more lucrative cards to mine ethereum.
I agree, when you buy the hardware you should be able to do what you please with it. This applies for something you already own and use.
Imagine a new driver, for hardware you already own where you couldn't watch cat videos (extreme example) in 4K but only in 360p :-)
On the other hand if you're well informed before buying such a card, that it will have reduced performance for crypto (or whatever) I guess it's ok and you can select something else.
We have to be realistic here and understand that on one hand NVIDIA hates miners since they're creating a shortage of cards for gamers but on the other hand they're the ones buying all new cards straight away for mining.
I think this is a marketing trick so that both gamers and miners are happy, RTX line for gamers and CMP line for miners, win-win for NVIDIA :-)
> I think this is a marketing trick so that both gamers and miners are happy, RTX line for gamers and CMP line for miners, win-win for NVIDIA :-)
But they won't magically have twice the amount of chips on hand, will they? So either they make a lot of CMP cards and too little RTX cards, and gamers will still struggle to get one, or they'll make sufficient RTX cards and too few CMP ones and miners have a big incentive to get around those restrictions (and will, in all likelihood). I guess they can mark up those CMP cards and include some mining-friendly features in the future for some additional revenue.
This could be the win-win-win for all parties, if only the cuda cores on the die have to be known good, it could mean, that the yield of nvidia goes up, gamers get their gpus with graphics, and miners get a card that can mine for a limited amount of time but then can't go into secondary market.
With their proprietary drivers and their separate Quadro cards (which are identical hardware but running different drivers), NVIDIA has already been dictating what you are running for ages.
This is not the start of NVIDIA dictating what you are running, just a new symptom of it.
Would be better if they just did specialised versions of their datacenter systems geared towards the issue and capitalise upon it for a win win around. However as a stop-gap solution that won't impact many, but some crypto miners - I can see what they are going for.
> RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent.
Why just Ethereum? This cannot possibly limit the sales of 3060 alone because there are a zillion cryptocurrencies.
People will just use it to mine for other crypto currencies right?.
Also 50% reduction. They wouldn't hardcode this percentage. The number obviously needs to be able to go up to 100% (no limit) and down to 0 - ie block it completely.
This effectively means 2 things:
1. Their detection algorithm is "upgradable". They wouldn't do that just for Ethereum.
2. That they can block any kind of workload they can detect.
Should we allow them to have the power to do that?
So they’re hamstringing normal cards (to protect gamers of course!) and releasing a “new” card without the hamstring at a higher price and we’re to believe this is simply to protect gamers and not a money grab?
It's a seller's market at the moment, so an easier "cash grab" would just be to increase the price of the base card to the higher price.
No, I think the belief is that they need to keep at least a minimal base of support among gamers and developers, for when the inevitable crypto crash comes and they need to go back to their original customer base
> Wouldn't the easy money grab be to just set MSRP for all cards way higher
But then how do they capture the "just gamers"? They would have to additionally sell a neutered card just for them, and that is exactly what they are doing here
Unless they're cheap no one is going to buy them. Those hash rates are terrible. I get 50MH+ on my 2080ti at around 200W. Why would someone buy hardware that's worse than a 2 year old GPU?
I don't know how they limit the performance, but I suspect that mining perf/watt is better than full load so possibly not bad for mining on higher electricity bill country.
Does it also cut the power consumption in half? If so that just means miners will buy more cards not less since their marginal cost of mining won't be affected.
What will happen when Bitcoin and other cryptos have awarded the max number of tokens and there's no more incentive for miners? Who will keep the system running?
There are two incentives for miners: the block reward and the transaction fees. After the max number of Bitcoins is reached there will be no more block rewards but fees will continue.
Absolutely hilarious that NVIDIA thinks this will prevent people from mining on their cards. Modified drivers will immediately be created and distributed.
Hahaha, this can't be real. Will they gimp the RTX-3060 in other applications like machine learning too? Will people who already bought these cards for mining have to watch out for updated drivers or firmware? This is an absolute nightmare scenario which will come back to haunt Nvidia for years. I can't believe they approved this.
It'll be interesting to see how games perform on the newly gimped cards people already own. Can they firmware-gimp a card to reliably stop mining without affecting games? We'll see!
>Hahaha, this can't be real. Will they gimp the RTX-3060 in other applications like machine learning too?
Maybe? It would make sense because ML use cases are professional and there's a lot of money to be made there.
This isn't without precedent. Quadro cards have always been 99% GeForce cards with some special bios magic to de-gimp them for CAD or VFX applications. They charge 4x the price because they know that workstations running $50,000 a seat software can afford the premium.
OK, but it still seems like a problem until people can see that this doesn't affect their games. Perhaps this will reduce demand among miners after all.
I shouldn't be surprised - this is what Nvidia already does with their Quadro vs. consumer line. Heck, I owned a Sound Blaster Live! which was functionally equivalent to the EMU APS and used the hacked drivers for years back in the olden days.
It is already not legal to use consumer cards for ML/AI/datacentre/commercial use according to their EULA and you are not permitted to install drivers at that point. They demand that you get an enterprise card
> Will they gimp the RTX-3060 in other applications like machine learning too?
While their move is questionable (I don't judge, but recognize that it's questionable), there is a situation out there that is 1. specific and 2. concrete (gaming cards that can't be purchased for gaming), which is unlikely to apply also to machine learning.
Good. This is exactly what I want. Make hash crunching meaningless on a gaming GPU and tell the people mining black market money to go buy an ASIC if they want to mine. Also stop selling on Amazon and Newegg and push the supply to physical stores. Computing tech need to come together and make amazon agree to banning scalper selling. Either it's sold at price or lower or not at all.
It's easy to forget that the impact of mining comes in waves - most gamers weren't complaining when the market became saturated by seccond hand GPUs at the end of the mining craze. At the end of the day GPUs are a luxury.
Some cryptocurrencies, like Monero (XMR) are ASIC-resistant by design, to prevent centralization. They are meant to be mined on commodity CPUs and GPUs
This is nothing but an attack on general purpose computing. So now if some company doesn’t like what you’re doing with their hardware they’re going to knee cap you? You might think it’s ok now because you don’t like the environmental effects of crypto mining but you better ask if your going to ok with the next thing they go after.
At this exact moment, yes (I would think). But that says nothing about tomorrow, or next month. Even if the crypto price stays the same or goes higher, your ROI depends on how many other people are mining and what their hash rate is.
The people that are doing the best right now are almost certainly the ones with fully depreciated equipment.
It’s like Apple saying you can’t use Linux emulators on iPhones through the App Store, but allowing Linux emulators through safari WebAssembly, which is 10x slower. Not that big of a deal IMO.
My understanding is that the ETH and other algorithms designed to be run on GPUs have big memory and memory bandwidth requirements, which is what makes it more difficult (or less cost effective?) to implement on an ASIC.
LE. I see you meant NVidia should be making the ASICs. In that case, that's exactly what they're doing, isn't it? This CMP line is exactly that.
The big draw of gaming cards is their resale value, when they become obsolete for mining they can be resold to gamers for significant fraction of their original price. Truly huge mining operations use ASICs anyway, but for medium sized farms gaming GPUs make more sense.
A product performs worse at some stuff than it might have in a hypothetical reality, and it says so on the box. What should be illegal about this, and why?
> Who in the holy F are you to tell me what to do with my product?
It is the same with hardware video encode, RTX cards are locked up to 2x streams at maximum while they are in most cases capable of many, many more (i.e. Plex transcodes). Not that this is an issue though, since it's a driver lock with a working fix.
I suspect there will be a bios fix for this lock about a day after they're released. Unless they put this in hardware somehow, it's not going to be effective.
And, they mention the ETH algorithm specifically is what they detect -- there are a bunch of other algorithms that aren't ETH that are profitable to mine.
Same thing for ECC being disabled on customer GPUs.
And ECC disabled on customer Intel CPUs and AMD Ryzen APUs. (AMD is quite sneaky there, non-Pro CPUs have ECC but non-Pro APUs don’t). Market segmentation is a usual thing on the computer market.
It's probably not even necessary. They're also introducing a card that removes everything not needed for mining. Unless they're overpricing that card, it will be more cost-effective for miners and outcompete the gamer cards.
This ignores the fact that cryptominers sell their old cards on to gamers, at a value which, due to the shortage, is potentially even higher than what they bought it at. The only way out I see is flooding the market or a crypto crash.
This isn't about product segmentation. They're artificially neutering their product.
It's perfectly fine to offer a different product that's designed for better performance but to artificially limit product A so that people are forced to buy product B (that's probably more expensive) is messed up.
It's tsmc if anyone who needs competition. Without solving the supply side, its unlikely that the situation will improve meaningfully for the consumer.
I agree GP's argument is a bit exaggerated, but this would be more akin to Apple announcing "we will no longer let you play music from XXX". IANAL but maybe there's grounds for a lawsuit on that.
Duh for some reason I already thought it was on the market. Yeah as long as it's clearly stated I imagine its fine. I guess the 3080 and 3070 will become even more premium.
first, this is very obviously because they noticed cloud operators are offering these RTX cards and they do not have a 10x-the-price-enteprise-quadroRTX yet.
what they think will happen:
they will blame miners for their production issues, make RTX cards less attractive for cloud operators, sell a truck load of quadro cards to them while offloading RTX cards to actual gamers who then generate revenue in other ways (they do not have those free game bundles deals for nothing)
What will happen:
nerf cards, lose sales for gamers and ML startups.
impact production lines even more with multiple models, lose sales for cloud operators.
cause actual miners (not their strawman 'oh the prices are up' for their production issues) to either reverse engineer the drivers, or just keep the old drivers running and buying the now-cheaper RTX cards, compounding the production capacity.
game studios that started to use those features to speed up crowd AI etc will just slap a "AMD Recommended" on their games.
oh boy! are you assuming the people responsible for GPU drivers are going to write what is basically a real time code signature detection and not screw up with ton of false positives to be debugged by the game studios themselves, at their own cost?
I really wish Nvidia would do this across the RTX product line.
Edit: the "Syrian refugee crossing into Europe" trope might pop up as a counter-argument for crypto. I am Syrian and still have relatives there. Refugees' assets are a drop in the ocean of speculators' mining and HODLing.