Last week, the Chinese user I_Leak_VN and the Vietnamese group Trại Trâu Công Nghệ signed up to mine the cryptocurrency Ethereum on the GeForce RTX 3060 at full capacity (ie with an inactive limiter). The former, after media pressure, admitted that he had colored the situation and that he was in fact benefiting from another cryptocurrency, which was not covered by the restriction. The Vietnamese, on the other hand, did not withdraw their words.
It soon became clear where the dog was buried. Nvidia has released a beta driver for testers and developers (470.05), in which it forgot to activate the limiter. Respectively, it included internal code (simple restrictions), which should not have been released to the public. We do not know if the Vietnamese were the first to notice this, but it does not change much in the fact that unrestricted mining is indeed possible and even thanks to Nvidia.
Although it stopped the distribution of the driver between insiders and developers, the effect of this step is comparable to stabbing a toothpick in the middle of the river.
Restriction of mining on the GeForce RTX 3060 is a thing of the past, cryptobarons can also buy cards for the purpose of mining (in this respect) the most advantageous cryptocurrency Ethereum. Now Nvidia will probably have to work hard to adjust the limiter on the upcoming models of graphics cards from the Ampere series so that it is not possible to use the already leaked driver on them. It’s hard to say, for example, how to prevent the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti from being flashed by the BIOS of one of the existing models, which does not have a limiter. But that is already the concern of the company’s software department.
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