I'm not a big fan of limiting hardware to run only approved software. One day it's for limiting crypto mining, the next day it will be for limiting our ability to use strong encryption. It's a slippery slope.
Anyway, I need not remind you of how big a boon cryptocurrencies have been to criminals and con artists. I think it should be pretty clear to anyone on this site why someone would be against them, just like it's clear to me why someone would be for them.
Exactly this. I'm guessing if they needed food they'd be out of luck.
There was no cash. ATMs we’re dry.
> boon cryptocurrencies have been to criminals and con artists
It is probably overstated.
Orders of magnitude more criminal activity would be going through cash and even orgs that are meant to KYC, such as Western Union or even iTunes gift certificates. How many grannies are sending crypto vs providing logins to their bank accounts?
I’m not a crypto-apologist, I just haven’t heard any solid arguments against it that can’t also be said about cash or the traditional banking system.
paypal, venmo, cashapp etc would have worked the same. for all of them and for crypto you need to be in the ecosystem (need wallets, accounts, apps etc) and internet access.
I guess what I want to get across is I’m not evangelising crypto, I just don’t necessarily want the space to die. I want them to keep iterating on the concept and see what other benefits can be generated.
Detonating a nuclear bomb to kill one person isn't exactly a praise for its effectiveness, either.
What if this energy waste enabled the purchase of 1,000 cars for people in desperate need? Would it then be worth it?
What if it were a million cars, or a billion?
Got a car today. Bought it with #bitcoin as all ATM's are almost cleared out and the credit card terminals are down. Hopefully, it will allow us to report a little from #Donbass while also keeping us safe and granting us an escape if things starts heating up here. [1]
They did end up both getting shot in the leg(s), but are now safe
To run that transmitter, you will need electricity. The electricity can be made in such situations via a generator/inverter by burning diesel.
Also, it ever gets attacked, much more will be at stake, including your freedom for choosing what software can be run on your computer.
It’s ok to not like cryptocurrency and not use it. Others can, and will. Be on the side that empowers people with technology, not the side that wants to take it away.
I'm not really advocating for taking it away. I'm happy with a natural death or a market induced death. I'd definitely advocate for hardware that's terrible at mining because I'm not really being given a lot of options. You can't really say "freedom to use your hardware as you will" out of one side of your mouth while saying "you can't want hardware with restrictions" out of the other. It's a paradox. We both want the hardware that works for us, don't we? If NVidia can make cards that suck at mining, it's my economic freedom and right to choose to support that, and I would, just like it's your economic right and freedom to buy all hardware in existence to waste energy.
I can tell you 100% that cryptocurrencies are the opposite of empowering for me and those around me in my current life.
Proof of work is the thing people have a problem with. There's lots of cryptographic techniques that you can use without proof of work.
And the only thing the likes of bitcoin need proof-of-work for is to avoid double-spending attacks.
Not quite sure what you mean by digital property. I can store valuable files just fine without proof-of-work. And we can copy them and give them to everyone in the world, too, at almost no cost.
Cryptocurrencies (and similar) allow you to keep a digital ledger. But the meaning of that ledger is still something we construct socially.
As a silly example: people agree to treat bitcoins as fungible. But they are perfectly traceable, so people could also agree to reject some specific bitcoin (and any descendent bitcoin that can be traced back to the banned ones; so if you mix them in a transaction, you just spread the taint).
For a slightly more real world example: I can imagine if Satoshi rose from the grave and held an auction to sell off the first bitcoin ever mined, he would get more than whatever bitcoin is currently trading for.
He's referring to the fact that this is an assault on general purpose computing, not that he specifically needs a GPU to do encryption.
I'd assume that developing extra features costs money. If a buyer doesn't need a feature, why should they have to pay for it?
For example, if a gamer does not need drivers for a CAD program, or crypto features, why should the gamer have to foot the bill for developing these features, and suffer the consequences of them (e.g. scarcity due to cryptominers buying all gaming cards) ?
If the hardware was actually different then of course your argument would make sense, you could build cards that can only be used for a certain use case and sell those, but in that case you wouldn't have to lock down the card anyways
I know it’s counter to human nature to be denied use of the physical object that you bought, but it’s not new territory.
I do agree with you, developers are expensive. And if i came across that way then that wasn't my intention.
If a gaming CPU doesn't support CAD tasks, never did so in the past and nobody expects them to suddenly do so.
However, what i personally was referring to is not lacking Software Support for a certain feature set but software throttling of Hardware.
Sadly it is something that happens a lot. Phones throttling because they received software updates, graphics cards pretending to be artificially slow because drivers include code specifically to slow them down.
In my opinion there is a big difference between "Sorry, we don't support that use case, but good luck to you" and "We are going to invest time to stop you from doing X"
The first is fine, it happens all the time. The second is (in my eyes) not.
Then as other have mentioned there are two options for GPU vendors:
* Hardware unblocked: GPU can be used for mining, scarcity becomes worse, good luck finding gaming GPUs for less than 2000$ for as long as it is profitable to use them for mining (~2 years maybe?)
* Hardware blocked: GPU can't be used for mining (profitably), gaming GPUs can be bought by gamers (still scarcity due to COVID, but not as bad)
The main reason only NVIDIA does this, and AMD and Intel don't isn't because of "freedom", but rather because AMD and Intel GPUs are so bad at compute that nobody can use them for anything but gaming anyways.
Independently of whether one agrees with nvidia's decision here, and whether it actually achieved its goal or not, the thought process isn't really hard to follow.
And I mean, before LHR people were complaining that miners were buying all nvidia gpus, and they couldn't get any, and asking nvidia to do something. nvidia did something, and now that people got to get the GPUs for gaming, they are complaining that they can't mine on them, which is probably the only reason they actually were able to get one in the first place.
So :shrug:. To be honest, it was foreseeable that people were going to complain either way.
It's one thing to test your chip and turn off defective parts so that you can sell a downgraded but still viable version and increase yields. Selling the exact same chips to everyone with software that locks out features just to segment the market is unacceptable and frankly quite offensive. It's the sort of thing that makes everyone wish they get cracked on principle, just to make things sane again.
AMD and Intel GPUs have the hardware capability of being great at CAD, but in practice they suck and nobody uses them because AMD and Intel do not have driver integration & certification with CAD software.
Why? Cause developing that costs money.
NVIDIA hardware and software only has this _because_ people that need it pay 10k$ for GFX cards that do these things.
If you'd wanted gamer cards to do these things, you'd need to add to the price tag of gamer cards the cost of developing and maintaining these things, which would make them more expensive.
The claim that this should be free because software and hardware costs nothing once you already have developed is illogical. CAD software, GPU driver software for CAD, and GPU hardware to meet CAD's demand, continues to evolve, which costs money.
It's a bit annoying, but also a trade-off I'd be willing to make for the right advantages.