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Comment by z3c0 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you overall - this does appear to be another resource curse - but I want to point out that the culprits in this matter are the companies that bottleneck the overly-abundant resources for profit (so Nvidia and Google), not the users who attempt to bleed constrained value through that bottleneck. Nvidia used their near-monopolistic power over the graphics card market in an attempt to globally limit the hash rate of mining. I doubt their intent was as altruistic as they spun it either - it seems very obviously a move to force miners to use more GPUs in parallel, to circumvent the limits in each single GPU. I find that to be more concerning than some hackers demanding that they stop.

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> it seems very obviously a move to force miners to use more GPUs in parallel

This is very obviously wrong. The economics of crypto mining are almost entirely dominated by power cost. Nvidia's decision here simply means they will use other hardware, not more of the LHR hardware.

Nvidia already can't make enough GPUs to satisfy demand. Why would they try to increase undesirable demand (which is going away soon anyway, at least for ETH).

If that's the case, then I stand corrected, but it does not change my point that a single company being able to bottleneck a resource is problematic.

The resources are bottlenecked due to the chip shortage, which happened because the entire automotive industry mis-forecast demand for the pandemic. All the GPU manufacturers have the same problem: they don't want to build GPU production lines for a market that is going away. The problem isn't Nvidia, it's proof of work, which will bottleneck as many resources as it can by design.

This is what happens when you try and build a planetary messaging system with inefficiency as a design goal.

You're likely not going to like this, but you agreeing with their reasoning for bottle-necking a resource does not make it any less problematic that they have the power to do so.

You imagine that you had a vendor selling bread, and you have people who need to eat, and a customer comes and asks for a year's supply of bread so they can have a bread bonfire as a sacrifice to their god so their god can take over the world, you're going to do everything in your power to avoid selling bread to those people. Because they are going to have their bonfire, their god will not appear, and meanwhile everyone will starve.

Nvidia doesn't unilaterally have this power - they are making the same rational choice as all the other GPU vendors, they are just doing it somewhat more forcefully.

I'm not sure nvidia actually sees mining as 'undesirable demand' .. sells cards, makes them money. They wouldn't give a shit if people were buying them to use as firewood.

I’m not sure Google can be blamed for the bottleneck since user behavior says that people will only look through so many search results before moving on. That’s not abundance since no matter how many results Google shows the people problem will remain.

Advertisers and marketers fighting for top positions are where the real curse comes from IMO.

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