News has been floating around about the recent developments in Nvidia vs crypto miners.
For those unfamiliar then cryptocurrencies usually have a hard maths problem at their heart that usually amounts to "try an awful lot of answers until you get the right combination". For various things then graphics cards, which in recent times have become more than just ways to push pixels, can crunch the numbers fast enough that it makes sense either for immediate sale or holding onto the mined currency and waiting for it to appreciate for a little while and then converting it.
This has meant miners of such things have been seen to purchase vast swathes of graphics cards to put into specialist rigs to in turn mine currency. That, especially along with the whole world situation at present, means shortage of cards. Shortage of cards and them still being a desirable purchase in turn means scalpers and bots seeking any available stock, a situation that bothers some.
Seeing this Nvidia thought they would try to split their market offering and allow a dedicated mining card as well as a normal games card but with operations typically done for mining somewhat slowed artificially. However it seems the artificial slowing was more of a software one than buried deep in a chip somewhere. Being software and seen as there are literally millions of dollars on the table for the ones that break the protections then... yeah.
This is not the first time a split for otherwise identical hardware has been offered. For many years now professional 3d modeller (be they computer aided design packages for engineering or those used by game and film creators) have had models that are generally similar but come with special drivers that might be slower but are far less crash prone and locked to specific rather expensive cards (somewhat out of date but a reasonable modern primer https://www.scan2cad.com/cad/cad-graphics-card/ ).
Anyway unlike some earlier reports, or perhaps it is said reports are unconfirmed, then the ethereum (one of the most popular "altcoins", which is to say in cryptocurrency there is bitcoin and everything else, and of everything else then ethereum is one of the biggest players) is not being mined but others that are, and it might be more of a detection that is done inside the card and slowed after a few seconds in if it looks like a mining type load (as opposed to gaming type load) is being performed.
Now if there is a core philosophy of the site then "my device, my rules" would probably be it. At the same time when talking of free speech "I may not like what you have to say but I will defend to to the death your right to say it" is a phrase you will hear, is this then the hardware/hacking equivalent of that?
Random video on the matter
So anyway thoughts on the matter? Do you support Nvidia in making crippled cards? If you do support it how do you reconcile with "my device, my rules"? Do you support hackers in breaking/bypassing blocks?
For those unfamiliar then cryptocurrencies usually have a hard maths problem at their heart that usually amounts to "try an awful lot of answers until you get the right combination". For various things then graphics cards, which in recent times have become more than just ways to push pixels, can crunch the numbers fast enough that it makes sense either for immediate sale or holding onto the mined currency and waiting for it to appreciate for a little while and then converting it.
This has meant miners of such things have been seen to purchase vast swathes of graphics cards to put into specialist rigs to in turn mine currency. That, especially along with the whole world situation at present, means shortage of cards. Shortage of cards and them still being a desirable purchase in turn means scalpers and bots seeking any available stock, a situation that bothers some.
Seeing this Nvidia thought they would try to split their market offering and allow a dedicated mining card as well as a normal games card but with operations typically done for mining somewhat slowed artificially. However it seems the artificial slowing was more of a software one than buried deep in a chip somewhere. Being software and seen as there are literally millions of dollars on the table for the ones that break the protections then... yeah.
This is not the first time a split for otherwise identical hardware has been offered. For many years now professional 3d modeller (be they computer aided design packages for engineering or those used by game and film creators) have had models that are generally similar but come with special drivers that might be slower but are far less crash prone and locked to specific rather expensive cards (somewhat out of date but a reasonable modern primer https://www.scan2cad.com/cad/cad-graphics-card/ ).
Anyway unlike some earlier reports, or perhaps it is said reports are unconfirmed, then the ethereum (one of the most popular "altcoins", which is to say in cryptocurrency there is bitcoin and everything else, and of everything else then ethereum is one of the biggest players) is not being mined but others that are, and it might be more of a detection that is done inside the card and slowed after a few seconds in if it looks like a mining type load (as opposed to gaming type load) is being performed.
Now if there is a core philosophy of the site then "my device, my rules" would probably be it. At the same time when talking of free speech "I may not like what you have to say but I will defend to to the death your right to say it" is a phrase you will hear, is this then the hardware/hacking equivalent of that?
Random video on the matter
So anyway thoughts on the matter? Do you support Nvidia in making crippled cards? If you do support it how do you reconcile with "my device, my rules"? Do you support hackers in breaking/bypassing blocks?
