It was an exciting time for many enthusiasts a few weeks ago when Nvidia announced that they would be taking steps to hit the cryptocurrency mining community with their newest cards on offer – suggesting that software could limit the mining hash rates for Ethereum in particular, there were hopes that it would make moves to stop with the botting purchases and the scalping of the newest releases, but there were also just as many believing this to be a PR play with little substance as uncertainty around how effective any measures put in place could be.
Some of this quickly became noticeable – recently it was shown that there were some who were able to bypass the driver measures put in place aimed at limiting effective mining, and that they could achieve expected speeds despite the block – and yesterday it was announced that the latest driver update scrapped the restrictions entirely. There has since been a PR announcement to state that the latest driver update had the unintended effect of disabling this feature so it is expected to go back to the way it had been, but it does also raise concerns around the fact it is something that can be turned on and off so easily which points once again to the sceptics worried that this is more of a PR play – it may instead be down to a hardware change in order to deliver the same result, but in a way that can’t be as easily changed.
(Image from techspot.com)
It may also be reliant on how the other cards with the newer chips perform too – with the suggested upcoming crypto specific cards on the way it may provide an opportunity for change but will also be hugely reliant on performance versus price, if the cost is too high for such a small upgrade, it’s unlikely any will follow the trend and change to the new cards as the old ones will continue to make more sense, and will only further strain the currently struggling GPU market.
As different markets within crypto continue to grow as many different services online have started to make the change from regular day to day business to gaming as free slot games for example expand payment options, and with the latest expansions in the Ethereum blockchains with the likes of NFT’s, there will be more eyes than ever focussed on crypto, and more attention on the mining side of it too – there will certainly need to be an answer, current supply shortages are already a problem, and with information suggesting that the newest cards can’t hold up to the restrictions put forward either, it will only exacerbate the existing issues.