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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

And don't get me started on DVD region locks.

It's easy to speak philosophically when you have no dog in the race. It's harder when you need a GPU for other tasks and have to pay the crypto tax.

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.

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?

Usually the amount of crypto that can be mined in a given time frame is limited. So you could buy more hardware, but it would not be profitable.

because building 8nm semiconductor fabs is slightly harder than setting up a lemonade stand.

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).

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.

the vast majority of their customers will happily give up crypto-mining for the chance to buy a card at a reasonable price

(... assuming the miners can't trivially patch to the drivers to re-enable the functionality)

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.

Gimp the memory bandwidth, that'll do it.

That will also hurt games. It's a huge differentiator between integrated GPUs and dedicated.

The real shame is allowing scalpers to run their stock dry and generating this problem.

Scalpers do not alter supply or demand.

What, to you, is the difference between a scalper and a dealer?

Support working hardware in the future (AMD)

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