Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdenton4 | Hacker News Reader

NVIDIA would reduce demand, but for the FAANG companies it's a neutral proposition, aside from the cost of doing the work to crash the currency.

And there's plenty of reasons to want to do so: Proof-of-work currencies are what make ransomware payments possible, and there's a large daily CO2 cost for proof of work currencies. The question is simply when is the cost of the externalities greater than the cost of acting?

View on HN

> One of the first ransomware attacks ever documented was the AIDS trojan (PC Cyborg Virus) that was released via floppy disk in 1989. Victims needed to send $189 to a P.O. box in Panama to restore access to their systems[0]...

[0]: https://www.crowdstrike.com/cybersecurity-101/ransomware/his...

Am I missing something? Why would NVIDIA want to reduce demand for their graphic cards?

There is actually a good case to make here. Nvidia currently is in the tough spot of a) not having the capacity to saturate the market and b) not being able to expand the production to match. B is because they don’t have enough confidence that the crypto people will be there as costumers in 5 years. And A is a problem, because their traditional user base (ie gamers) won’t match the spending, but will still get their fix (just not from Nvidia). And that breaks the strangle hold that they had a couple of years ago on that market.

So short term: having the high prices paid by crypto people is nice. But it destroys their relationship to their old customer base. Depending on where the crypto market will be in 5, 10, 15 years, this can be the 5x of their market cap or the 0.2x

Relying on single customer can have quite severe negative consequences (walmart crushing whole businesses is a good example). GPU shortage is destroying PC position as a viable gaming platform. Give it couple more years of GPU shortages and Nvidia will irrevocably lose whole market segment, leaving it with compute and shaky scam riddled crypto.

Yes, nvidia and AMD should collude to destroy crypto from a market risk reduction perspective.

They have done things like come up with a mining only SKU, apparently partially because they are annoyed that people aren't using their cards for their intended purpose. Probably, while a sale is a sale, they see the crypto market as flakier and would rather keep their gaming reputation intact.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com