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Comment by ddtaylor | Hacker News Reader

I don't think Nvidia (or most companies) should be deciding what to do with the tools they sell. I don't want someone telling me what software I can run with my CPU or GPU any more than I want someone telling me what I am allowed to build with the hammers or screwdrivers I buy.

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Fuck miners. They drove the cost of the 1000 series cards up when btc peaked at 14k. Then the 2000 series was the same price as when the btc peaked. Now the 3080 is selling at 2000+ euros.

The problem is really more to do with the fact that intellectual property makes the production of these highly demanded resources very constrained.

High chance of changing your mind when these tools get hoarded by those who do not build anything at all and only race arms. Mining business is basically that.

I think the market is working as expected here, since a higher price is placed on the ability to decentralize finance versus having a few people playing video games at higher quality. If you're interested in machine learning there are resources specifically for that, such as Google's Tensorflow Processing Units (TPUs)

“higher price is placed on the ability for few people to participate in speculation and money laundering versus having better 3d modelling in realtime for everyone”

This word play can be played backwards too.

People who use tools to make money are going to spend more on them than those use use tools for entertainment. So if a company wants to prevent pros from buying their consumer-grade products, then preventing the consumer-grade tools from being used for pro features is a great way to do it.

nVidia has been doing this for decades with their Quadro cards. They use the bios/drivers to hide the features necessary for CAD out of the GeForce cards.

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