Nvidia Sold $175 Million Worth of GeForce RTX 30 GPUs To Crypto Miners

[Bombastinator]

15 minutes ago, dharaneesh said:

THERE IS A SPECIFIC RANGE OF GPU'S ONLY MEANT  FOR MINING AND THOSE FOR SURE CAN'T BE USE IN GAMES, THEN WHY ARE MINERS EXPLOITING THE PRODUCTS THOSE ARE FOR GAMERS JUST BECAUSE THOSE COULD ALSO DO GOOD IN MINING AND THE POINT IS THAT MINERS ARE CUSTOMERS FOR MINING GPU'S AND DEFINETLY STEALERS IN GAMING GUP'S

LTT just released a video on this one.  It pointed out that that 175 million was something like 6% of released GPUs so even if the numbers are right they still don’t really matter.

 

I recall a hardware unboxed video where the announcers discussed previous gpu releases and compared them to this one.  According to them this last session bears very little difference if any to previous releases availability wise.  Apparently it’s always like this. 

[Moonzy]

3 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

No you can't. Try going into a store and paying in etherium and see what they say. Sure a select few places will accept it but most won't. 

You can't buy things with USD everywhere too, you'll have to convert it

[Arika]

18 minutes ago, dharaneesh said:

THERE IS A SPECIFIC RANGE OF GPU'S ONLY MEANT  FOR MINING AND THOSE FOR SURE CAN'T BE USE IN GAMES, THEN WHY ARE MINERS EXPLOITING THE PRODUCTS THOSE ARE FOR GAMERS JUST BECAUSE THOSE COULD ALSO DO GOOD IN MINING AND THE POINT IS THAT MINERS ARE CUSTOMERS FOR MINING GPU'S AND DEFINETLY STEALERS IN GAMING GUP'S

Sorry, i dont speak CAPSLOCK, but from my rudimentary interpretation of what you're asking, there hasn't been dedicated mining GPUs since pascal's P104 and P106. So no, there aren't any specific mining GPUs in the current gen. Miners are customers of GPUs, just like Gamers are customers of GPUs

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, zhnu said:

No but some of them can be used to secure transactions or other important data transmission. Printed money is a question of when it will disappear in some countries where the majority of payments are made by other means.

My understanding is the nearer one is to an organized crime center or a rogue state with a controlled currency with runaway inflation or something the easier it is to use.  Cryptocurrency isn’t supplanting real currency it’s supplanting the world war2 cigarettes as currency economy.

[Kisai]

17 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Because selling them to miners sets no loyalty, creates no ecosystem, creates a very short term infusion of cash with zero long term income. Miners just buy whatever brings them best mining ratio

 

See the thing is, nVidia makes cards intended for high denstity compute, and the Geforce cards are not that. The Geforce cards have always been for retail, gaming customers and the only way they enforce that is by locking driver features to the non-Geforce parts so that the gaming performance is better on the Geforce but the reliability is better on all the other parts.

 

18 hours ago, Arika S said:

says who?

 

Miners are customers too. Why are "gamers" more entitled to new GPUs than anyone else?

 

Because the Geforce parts are for gaming. They get used for neuralnet work as well and that's not what it's intended for, but what are you going to do when you can't buy GPU time from a cloud. 

 

I could understand if someone was building a compute cluster, but they aren't, they're just going to waste energy on speculative cryptomining that is worse for the planet than people playing games with them.

 

17 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

Mining farms shouldn't be more entitled to gaming graphics cards than the consumer these cards should be sold to. This is nvidia saying one thing, claiming theres "unprecedented demand" and saying they're trying to keep up but actually doing another thing lying to the consumer and selling directly to mining companies. Not sure if that's even legal but nvidia has enough money to avoid any legal trouble. 

 

I think nVidia is full of crap here really. There is nothing the customer can do to punish this behavior by nVidia, since they will just do it again. However we can punish the cryptocoin ponzi schemes by not being stupid and nope'ing out of it. Put it this way, the coin miners just bought 175 million dollars worth of pay-to-win. You, with one geforce card, are never catching up or being competative, period.

 

 

17 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

How exactly are they lying? I'd like a sourced quote from Nvidia saying anything in relation to miners not getting cards.

 

Fun fact: Nvidia are a business, shocking I know but its true. They are in it for the profit and they owe nothing to anybody, Miners are customers in the same way Gamers are, Nvidia can choose to sell their cards to whoever they choose. Its called the free market for a reason.

 

Why does it even matter? Nvidia could have sold every card they had ready for the launch directly to miners (I have my suspicion that AMD did) and there would be nothing any of us could do about it other than start a Twitter brigade.

 

Their business, their product.

 

Because Miners produce nothing. They turn energy into heat and then try to assign imaginary value to it in order to get big stupid finance companies like Paypal to to accept them so they can do the "dump" part of the pump-and-dump.

 

17 hours ago, GOTSpectrum said:

I buy GPUs specifically for folding, I have four running atm, they have never seen a game. Is this also not okay or am I good? 

 

Y'know just seeing as you seem to the person to ask about what GPUs can be used for even though I've paid for them. 

 

There's a difference in this context. You're using a gaming GPU to do a non-gaming activity, not unlike people doing neuralnet training. If those computers are are contributing to a net-good, or a personal project and you can justify wasting your own money on the energy cost, then, fine. But in most cases the folding activity is just seen as a competitive game to people who donate equipment to it. Cryptocoins have no net-good, consume energy without producing anything. It's backed by nothing. The people running these crypto farms are just another reason why coal plants aren't being closed, because they can just sell the energy in bulk to these cryptofarms.

 

The point that Bitcoin, Ethereum , and everything else like it will die when the input costs exceed the output profit. Ethereum is currently $510.78, which requires 1.03Kwh per transaction, where as Bitcoin is $16,961.60 and 23.38Kwh per transaction. 

 

 

https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/ , Bitcoin and Ethereum consume 90.48Twh per year. Gas/Oil costs around $1000/Kwh to build. That is $90,480,000,000.00 worth of generation capacity being used to service bitcoin using the dirty energy. The bitcoin miners sure aren't investing in clean energy, and they could defer a lot of complaints about speculative nature if they only operated their coin farming in places to GET clean generation capacity to places that currently rely on dirty generation capacity.

 

 

[thorhammerz]

39 minutes ago, Arika S said:

Who are you to say who can buy what products?

..

Why are your "ethics" any better than mine?

 

Didn't you get the memo? Some animals are simply more equal than others .

[Blademaster91]

10 minutes ago, thorhammerz said:

 

Didn't you get the memo? Some animals are simply more equal than others .

Some people seem to be insisting mining is more important than anything else even though it's not a steady source of income.

25 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

LTT just released a video on this one.  It pointed out that that 175 million was something like 6% of released GPUs so even if the numbers are right they still don’t really matter.

 

I recall a hardware unboxed video where the announcers discussed previous gpu releases and compared them to this one.  According to them this last session bears very little difference if any to previous releases availability wise.  Apparently it’s always like this. 

Even if its 6% that still matters with how bad the RTX 30 series launch went.

But with supplies on everything being lower, and shipping being delayed this release is probably worse. Like no stores had stock, at least with the RTX 20 series I recall if you wanted a GPU so badly you could hurry through the checkout to at least have a chance at getting a card.

[Bombastinator]

24 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

Cash is still a thing for a reason. People use it everyday so to call it useless is kinda dumb. Go to a store and try and use cryptocurrency and see how far that gets you because nobody in their right mind would want payment in cryptocurrency as its price is to volatile. 

 

14 minutes ago, zhnu said:

Or to secure bank transaction for example. And the second isn't a statement that crypto will surpass regular currency is that in some countries regular currency will be replace by digital payments.

Digital payments most of the time ARE done in regular currency.  You make is sound like the only way business can be done is with people hauling briefcases full of cash around.  It hasn’t been that was since the 16th century. I don’t even normally keep cash in my wallet anymore but none of my normal day is spent using crypto currency of any kind.  The only use cryptocurrency has is it is designed to evade traditional tracking methods (but not non traditional ones) to evade law enforcement. In every other aspect that exists it’s worse.

[thorhammerz]

14 minutes ago, Blademaster91 said:

Some people seem to be insisting mining is more important than anything else

The "miners" ponied up the money for first dibs on the goods, end of story. What they do with the cards, is their own business.

 

If the local power companies / governments have issues with said "mining", it is laughably easy for them to create economic (dis)incentives. Same goes for "gaming" really (China has already moved on that).

 

If the local authorities have issues with the "advertising", then NVDA will simply change the messaging. Supply distribution remains unchanged (first dibs to those who are willing to hit the bid in sufficient volume, even if it goes through the AIBs first).

Quote

even though it's not a steady source of income.

What the "miners" do or don't do (and whether they are "profitable" or not) is their own problem once they have the cards. If they find it unprofitable, then good for "gamers": the secondary resale market now gets a supply glut (and NVDA can have fun re-arranging future product schedules and telling investors why they can't sell as many products that quarter).

[AlTech]

10 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

On the hardware level or in the drivers?

Presumably in the drivers.

 

Although it is technically against the Radeon Software TOS to use AMD cards for mining and people'll do it anyways.

10 hours ago, Blademaster91 said:

The RX 6000 launch has basically been a paper launch, AMD uses TSMC for consoles, CPU's and GPU's but I doubt supply could've been that bad, I wouldn't be surprised if they were selling to miners even if the cards aren't good for mining.

To put it in perspective, a 6800XT is literally 10 to 15% faster at mining than a 5700XT. AMD if they wanted could make it 1.5x to 2x faster.

 

An Nvidia card for mining is a no brainer compared to RDNA2 for mining.

 

AMD doesn't have as good of a logistics and shipping network as Nvidia does. AMD's also said they didn't expect as many people to want to buy AMD cards, they've increased production at TSMC by between 20% and 50% but it'll take a couple of months to fully see the effect of that.

[AlTech]

10 hours ago, The Blackhat said:

 

You can laugh all you want but it's true. AMD doesn't want to sell to miners, they want to sell to gamers.

 

AMD is pissed off that AIBs are selling AIB cards for substantially above MSRP because they want to sell gaming cards to gamers at MSRP.

[Brooksie359]

44 minutes ago, zhnu said:

No but some of them can be used to secure transactions or other important data transmission. Printed money is a question of when it will disappear in some countries where the majority of payments are made by other means.

Not true in the slightest. There will likely never be a time when cash is eliminated. It's simply way to convenient for people who don't have a ton of money as its hard to get a bank account with only 20 bucks. As for securing transactions I don't see how that is even necessary when we already have other methods of doing that so its not very useful. Cryptocurrency is honestly a joke. Its basically a stock market with no regulations and no company to back the price. 

[Bombastinator]

The impression I am getting is that the new US TSMC plant can’t come soon enough for anyone.  AMD and Apple need chips and TSMC can’t make enough of them.

[Brooksie359]

45 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

You can't buy things with USD everywhere too, you'll have to convert it

You don't get the point at all. USD is a legal tender and Businesses are required to allow the use of USD as payment for goods and services in the US. The same cannot be said for cryptocurrecy. There is nowhere that is required to accept cryptocurrency as payment. The currency could be worthless tomorrow and you wouldn't be able to use it for anything while the same cannot be said about USD unless the US government were to no longer be there to enforce it. 

[Moonzy]

1 minute ago, Brooksie359 said:

You don't get the point at all. USD is a legal tender and Businesses are required to allow the use of USD as payment for goods and services in the US. The same cannot be said for cryptocurrecy. There is nowhere that is required to accept cryptocurrency as payment. The currency could be worthless tomorrow and you wouldn't be able to use it for anything while the same cannot be said about USD unless the US government were to no longer be there to enforce it. 

U can't use USD as is as legal tender in my country, you'll have to convert it to local currency

 

Same goes for crypto, you convert them into fiat currency through exchanges

If you still don't understand the comparison, then idk what else to say

[dharaneesh]

59 minutes ago, Arika S said:

Sorry, i dont speak CAPSLOCK, but from my rudimentary interpretation of what you're asking, there hasn't been dedicated mining GPUs since pascal's P104 and P106. So no, there aren't any specific mining GPUs in the current gen. Miners are customers of GPUs, just like Gamers are customers of GPUs

.

 

[Bombastinator]

1 hour ago, Arika S said:

Sorry, i dont speak CAPSLOCK, but from my rudimentary interpretation of what you're asking, there hasn't been dedicated mining GPUs since pascal's P104 and P106. So no, there aren't any specific mining GPUs in the current gen. Miners are customers of GPUs, just like Gamers are customers of GPUs

With your permission I will steal the phrase “sorry I don’t speak CPASLOCK” for my own use in the future. 

[Exty]

i think the whole problem here is that nvidia is directly selling a consumer based product to a prosumer. in other words what they are doing is morally wrong. Also to Moonzy just because you think being an asshole is ok, does not mean it is.

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, Exty said:

i think the whole problem here is that nvidia is directly selling a consumer based product to a prosumer. in other words what they are doing is morally wrong. Also to Moonzy just because you think being an asshole is ok, does not mean it is.

*has yet to see an example of that happening*

[Brooksie359]

15 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

U can't use USD as is as legal tender in my country, you'll have to convert it to local currency

 

Same goes for crypto, you convert them into fiat currency through exchanges

If you still don't understand the comparison, then idk what else to say

My point is that cryptocurrency is not required to be taken anywhere. The same cannot be said about traditional currency. Sure I can't use USD outside of the US for the most part but when in the US I know I can use it. With crypto their is no such  guarantee. You could be stuck with a useless currency tomorrow as nobody has to take it as payment anywhere. 

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, Brooksie359 said:

My point is that cryptocurrency is not required to be taken anywhere. The same cannot be said about traditional currency. Sure I can't use USD outside of the US for the most part but when in the US I know I can use it. With crypto their is no such  guarantee. You could be stuck with a useless currency tomorrow as nobody has to take it as payment anywhere. 

Yes it can.  Happens every second.  
 

The only time actual cash moves in large amounts is when there is a “cash business” or some sort of inequality in cash transfer continues for a long time. 

[Brooksie359]

3 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Yes it can.  Happens every second.  
 

The only time actual cash moves in large amounts is when there is a “cash business” or some sort of inequality in cash transfer continues for a long time. 

I honestly have no clue what you are saying. Yes what can? What happens every second? 

[Bombastinator]

43 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

I honestly have no clue what you are saying. Yes what can? What happens every second? 

The thing you were saying doesn’t happen. Electronic payments using real rather than crypto currency.

 

I dunno. Perhaps I made a mistake there.  Pretending not to understand is a standard debate tactic when one has been caught flat footed.  It forces the opponent to restate the case and expose the failure while giving the pretender a chance to regroup.  If the other party doesn’t do it perfectly the standard move is to attack that imperfection. I didn’t do that.  I just answered your question as if it was real.  It might have been.  

Edited November 28, 2020 by Bombastinator

[Kisai]

3 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

My point is that cryptocurrency is not required to be taken anywhere. The same cannot be said about traditional currency. Sure I can't use USD outside of the US for the most part but when in the US I know I can use it. With crypto their is no such  guarantee. You could be stuck with a useless currency tomorrow as nobody has to take it as payment anywhere. 

It's actually increasingly more common to be UNABLE to use US currency outside the US. This is due to nothing except exchange rate bias/commissions.

 

For example, if I want to buy a game on Steam, (this is a random game)

https://steamdb.info/app/555160/

Take note of that difference on how a game costs $15USD but costs equivalent to 7.92 in Taiwan. Now what's the true exchange rate? $15USD is $427.78NT , $7.92USD is $225.87NT. Ok, So let's say Steam actually let me pay in cryptocoins. You can't, not directly. What happens is you buy a bitcoin you are trading it for steam credit. Steam stopped doing it directly in 2017. https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/6/16743220/valve-steam-bitcoin-game-store-payment-method-crypto-volatility , and steam also won't let you activate gift cards in any currency but the country you're in.

 

Big companies that operate globally keep money in currencies they deal with, but it's still a nuisance when customers outside the country that have and use USD have to trade their currencies to their local currency and then it's effectively costs more. For example, Canada, 10.7% cheaper right? Wrong. Sales Taxes in Canada can be up to 15%. Now consider the exchange rate, If I transfer 100$ USD to CAD right now via xe, I get $129.947CAD, in theory. In practice, you lose 0.08 per dollar in commission. So that $100USD ends up being $126 if done at an actual bank. If I have to transfer that money via Paypal first, I also lose another 4%.

 

For all practical reasons, yes, it would make sense for there to be one global currency everyone can use without being nickel-and-dimed by banks and financial companies, but in practice cryptocoins has not been this, and never will be. Here I am complaining about losing 27% of my USD to buy a game valued in USD when if I did the same trade via bitcoin, it would have lost $3.00 twice in addition to the 4% commission in each direction. Maybe I might come out ahead $10 if the transaction can be done simultaneously, maybe not. Nobody wants to, or can keep money in bitcoin wallets because of the volatility, and if they do, they are even less ahead than they are if they just let paypal use their bad rates.

 

So it's down to "pay more for USD products, despite having USD" because these companies underlying payment processors and global tax systems are complex and stupid, or there will be a market for paper-only addresses in the US just to dodge all these double-taxation/exchange processes so they don't have to deal with cryptocoins at all, just use the USD in the first place. Boy does it ever suck to convert money when you pay your income taxes, and that's when people end up claiming they have no income, because the government's made it impossible to deal in the local currency anymore.

 

[Elisis]

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

AMD doesn't want to sell to miners, they want to sell to gamers.

They will sell to anyone who will give them money.