Nvidia removes driver that bypassed the RTX 3060's Ethereum mining limiter

midian182

midian182

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What just happened? Nvidia has pulled the developer driver it released yesterday that removed the "unhackable" Ethereum mining limiter code from its RTX 3060 card. Sadly for the company, copies of the software will doubtlessly be in the hands of mining communities, which will use it to bypass the card's restrictions.

Yesterday brought the surprising news that the GeForce 470.05 beta driver, which was available to developers under the Windows Insider Program, removed the hash rate limiter from most RTX 3060 cards. Given how much Nvidia lauded the limiter as "unhackable," one imagines that the employee responsible for releasing a workout will be feeling the heat right now.

Nvidia has since confirmed the driver contained the limiter-removing code. "A developer driver inadvertently included code used for internal development which removes the hash rate limiter on RTX 3060 in some configurations," a company spokesperson said in a statement. "The driver has been removed."

Nvidia had stressed that the limiter wasn't just "a driver thing."

"There is a secure handshake between the driver, the RTX 3060 silicon, and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents removal of the hash rate limiter," Nvidia's head of communications, Bryan Del Rizzo, previously said.

PC Gamer notes that the driver workaround has some restrictions when using more than one card running the Ethereum mining algorithm. Riser cables can't be used, which are common in huge mining rigs, and you'll need a motherboard with plenty of PCIe slots if you want to run more than one RTX 3060 at the top 50MH/s mining rate. You also need to stick a dummy HDMI connector in each card.

Nvidia has hinted that all its future GeForce cards will come with the same Ethereum hash rate limiter, including the RTX 3080 Ti that's rumored to drop next month. It'll be interesting to see if the current driver will also unlock the restrictions on these products, though the company will likely implement a way to block it.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/88940-nvidia-removes-driver-bypassed-rtx-3060-ethereum-mining.html

 
Honestly, I don't see a point in artificially limiting the cards (and was kinda hoping the title implied they did a 180). It doesn't even do enough to de-incentivize it, and it will get hacked/bypassed eventually.

This LTT video covers why (for the most part)
 
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QuantumPhysics said:
CONGRESS needs to step in. Make crypto mining illegal and use "global warming" or "climate change" regulation as a pretext.
Click to expand...
Lmao, good luck with that. Most of your congressman don’t have the faintest idea of what crypto mining is. They have barely even got a handle on what Facebook is!

And they wouldn’t want to hurt the profits of American tech giants, most of their execs donated money to the Biden campaign. Although I have no idea if Nvidia did or not.
 
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With the deflationary value of cryptocurrency, why would anyone purchase any sort of high value item/asset with it when they can just "hold" their cryptocurrency indefinitely and become infinitely "richer", based on claims Bitcoin will eventually exceed $1m? Buy a car for $20,000 worth of Bitcoin for example, for in 6 months that Bitcoin to possibly be worth $100,000. So I basically paid $100,000 for a car that's only worth $20,000. No wonder Musk wants to use it as a means of purchasing Teslas. He wins, and you lose. Of course such metaphors already exist with pizza:

https://bitcoinpizzaindex.net/

Why would I buy any sort of high value item with cryptocurrency and risk devastating financial erosion and not just sit on the ever increasing value of my cryptocurrency investment, anticipating its increase in value? How could that possibly work as a payment system in the wider economy and the real world? I'm genienly interested in the answer to this if anyone could enlighten me.
 
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QuantumPhysics said:
CONGRESS needs to step in. Make crypto mining illegal and use "global warming" or "climate change" regulation as a pretext.
Click to expand...
CONGRESS needs to step in. Make Gaming illegal and use "global warming" or "climate change" regulation as a pretext.

CONGRESS needs to step in. Make Burgers illegal and use "global warming" or "climate change" regulation as a pretext.

CONGRESS needs to step in. Make Having Children illegal and use "global warming" or "climate change" regulation as a pretext.

All of these are equally rediculous to "muh crypto should be illegal, I wanna play my vidya!". Besides, why does somewone with a RTX 3090, 3080, 3070, and a 3060ti, who has benefited from flipping some of said cards, want to make crypto illegal so badly?
 
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themaster08 said:
With the deflationary value of cryptocurrency, why would anyone purchase any sort of high value item/asset with it when they can just "hold" their cryptocurrency indefinitely and become infinitely "richer", based on claims Bitcoin will eventually exceed $1m? Buy a car for $20,000 worth of Bitcoin for example, for in 6 months that Bitcoin to possibly be worth $100,000. So I basically paid $100,000 for a car that's only worth $20,000. No wonder Musk wants to use it as a means of purchasing Teslas. He wins, and you lose. Of course such metaphors already exist with pizza:

https://bitcoinpizzaindex.net/

Why would I buy any sort of high value item with cryptocurrency and risk devastating financial erosion and not just sit on the ever increasing value of my cryptocurrency investment, anticipating its increase in value? How could that possibly work as a payment system in the wider economy and the real world? I'm genienly interested in the answer to this if anyone could enlighten me.
Click to expand...
You could say the same thing about ANY asset really. Why sell your house now when you could jsut hold onto it and sell it 2 years from now for more? You just sold your house for HALF ITS VALUE!

Except you didnt. The future value of whatever your asset is doesnt matter now, because now is now. An asset's value will always change, the value comes from your ability to sell it. If you hold onto assets forever, no matter if it is crypto or stocks or gold or whatever, then it is effectively worth $0.

So yes, you COULD hold onto that $20000 and it could turn into $100,000. OR it could turn into $500 if the market crashes again (whcih it will, eventually, it always does). So once it has attained enough value, the owner can use it for what they want to buy. Because what will happen is more people will start to sell as the value goes up, which will lead to a decrease in value, which will lead to a panic, which leads into a market crash. It'll happen again, it just takes one big investor selling out to start it.
 
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Theinsanegamer said:
You could say the same thing about ANY asset really. Why sell your house now when you could jsut hold onto it and sell it 2 years from now for more? You just sold your house for HALF ITS VALUE!

Except you didnt. The future value of whatever your asset is doesnt matter now, because now is now. An asset's value will always change, the value comes from your ability to sell it. If you hold onto assets forever, no matter if it is crypto or stocks or gold or whatever, then it is effectively worth $0.

So yes, you COULD hold onto that $20000 and it could turn into $100,000. OR it could turn into $500 if the market crashes again (whcih it will, eventually, it always does). So once it has attained enough value, the owner can use it for what they want to buy. Because what will happen is more people will start to sell as the value goes up, which will lead to a decrease in value, which will lead to a panic, which leads into a market crash. It'll happen again, it just takes one big investor selling out to start it.
Click to expand...

I agree in principal, however the growth of property and other investments is more incremental and stable. The chances of a property fluctuating between $20,000 and $100,000 in value in a short period of time is higly unlikely (though I acknowledge it's not entirely impossible).

What I'm talking about is devastating financial erosion due to the ever fluctuating and increasing value in such a short period of time, not expected financial erosion over a long period of time - this doesn't happen with Fiat currency (at least in the vast majority of cases).

More to the point, my focus is more on how could you use this a a payment system, not an investment? It's a "coin" at the end of the day, which means you can purchase items with it. I can't purchase items with my house.
 
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Somehow reading all the comments they all steered off topic IMHO. And the topic was nVidia! And to that all I can say, well, that didn’t take long but in all honesty we all knew it would happen eventually but no one ever suspected the “hack” would come from nVidia itself! ;-)
 
QuantumPhysics said:
CONGRESS needs to step in. Make crypto mining illegal and use "global warming" or "climate change" regulation as a pretext.
Click to expand...
tenor.gif
 
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Some one more sceptical than me would say they did this on purpose to have there cake and eat it, good PR for reducing the rate and "accidently" releasing a driver into the while so people in the know can use it. Either that or there is someone in Nvidia that was given some serious dough to have it included by mistake. I mean They are not stupid enough to release the one thing they advertised it with.
 
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This time I'm not going to even comment on regulations and environmental issues, you guys seem to have covered that with a pointless back and forward that's identical on each of these threads.

This time I'll just say that there's a tiny bit of hope that Nvidia won't
1) Won't make the same mistake with the 3070ti 3080ti and 3050
2) Isn't boasting or exaggerating the strength of this alleged hardware handshake and henceforth just taking a few more days to be bypassed (Vs well, immediately as it was the case with the 3060)
3) Nvidia won't immediately use this new found powers as an excuse to just start black listing things they don't like or finding a way to use it to well, get intrusive but valuable personal data mining.

I am confident at least one of the above points won't come true but if we're lucky, within the next 3 to 6 months after new GPUs are released, we might be able to buy something to game with.

But maybe I'm just being naive here.
 
I'm not angry about this "mistake" or whatever the actual event. It's possible those are indeed by mistake. Or maybe not, I don't care.
But they said that the limit is more than drivers, which is a blatant lie. If it were indeed so, no amount of mistakes on drivers could have reverted it.
 
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Shadowboxer said:
Lmao, good luck with that. Most of your congressman don’t have the faintest idea of what crypto mining is. They have barely even got a handle on what Facebook is!

And they wouldn’t want to hurt the profits of American tech giants, most of their execs donated money to the Biden campaign. Although I have no idea if Nvidia did or not.
Click to expand...

It doesn't matter if they know anything about it or not....Just saying it will help stop climate change and they will vote for it.
 
QuantumPhysics said:
CONGRESS needs to step in. Make crypto mining illegal and use "global warming" or "climate change" regulation as a pretext.
Click to expand...
No they don't. They should probably start accepting that it's not going anywhere and adapt to it.
Dimitriid said:
This time I'm not going to even comment on regulations and environmental issues, you guys seem to have covered that with a pointless back and forward that's identical on each of these threads.

This time I'll just say that there's a tiny bit of hope that Nvidia won't
1) Won't make the same mistake with the 3070ti 3080ti and 3050
2) Isn't boasting or exaggerating the strength of this alleged hardware handshake and henceforth just taking a few more days to be bypassed (Vs well, immediately as it was the case with the 3060)
3) Nvidia won't immediately use this new found powers as an excuse to just start black listing things they don't like or finding a way to use it to well, get intrusive but valuable personal data mining.

I am confident at least one of the above points won't come true but if we're lucky, within the next 3 to 6 months after new GPUs are released, we might be able to buy something to game with.

But maybe I'm just being naive here.
Click to expand...
What's the mistake exactly? Limiting cards or the accidental driver?
I've managed to get 6 3060 Tis, one 3060 and one 3070 for msrp. Passed on multiple 3090s. Y'all ain't trying hard enough.
 
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Skjorn said:
No they don't. They should probably start accepting that it's not going anywhere and adapt to it.
What's the mistake exactly? Limiting cards or the accidental driver?
I've managed to get 6 3060 Tis, one 3060 and one 3070 for msrp. Passed on multiple 3090s. Y'all ain't trying hard enough.
Click to expand...
The accidental bypass with a dev driver I mean. Limiting the cards might be considered a mistake but only after we confirm this affects a legit purpose other than mining
 
Knowing Nvidia, they will be screwing everybody with an RTX card 2 or 3 gen... I am willing to bet BTC on it.. I dropped from 52 to 47, that is massive drop on the 25 cards
 
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themaster08 said:
With the deflationary value of cryptocurrency, why would anyone purchase any sort of high value item/asset with it when they can just "hold" their cryptocurrency indefinitely and become infinitely "richer", based on claims Bitcoin will eventually exceed $1m? Buy a car for $20,000 worth of Bitcoin for example, for in 6 months that Bitcoin to possibly be worth $100,000. So I basically paid $100,000 for a car that's only worth $20,000. No wonder Musk wants to use it as a means of purchasing Teslas. He wins, and you lose. Of course such metaphors already exist with pizza:

https://bitcoinpizzaindex.net/

Why would I buy any sort of high value item with cryptocurrency and risk devastating financial erosion and not just sit on the ever increasing value of my cryptocurrency investment, anticipating its increase in value? How could that possibly work as a payment system in the wider economy and the real world? I'm genienly interested in the answer to this if anyone could enlighten me.
Click to expand...
Holding crypto doesn't mean I don't spend crypto, it means I'm far choosier who I spend crypto with, because I know I'm giving them something inherently more valuable than Uncle Sam's Fun Bux.

Inflationary economies have also lead to debt-based consumer spending, rampant government spending, and consumption for consumption's sake that's devastated the environment and depleted the planet. So I don't think you have any place to tell me what's unsustainable.

NeoMorpheus said:
tenor.gif
Click to expand...
I put him on ignore, but it's not terribly effective if y'all keep engaging his increasingly histrionic rants. He gets ratio'd worse than the KKK on Twitter, you can leave it to collapse on its own two feet.
 
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