Nvidia’s LHR Effort To Stop Ethereum Miners Was A Failure, Reveals Report
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A report reveals which Nvidia’s efforts to stave off Ethereum miners from using their GPUs for mining was apparently a failure.
Nvidia’s LHR Couldn’t Stop Miners From Mining Ethereum
As per a report from PCMag, it seems Nvidia’s LHR-version graphics cards weren’t sufficient to hold off miners from mining Ethereum (ETH) on them.
The “Lite Hash Rate” line of GPUs was an effort by the world’s leading graphics card company to prevent miners from mining on their cards.
Following the onset of COVID back in 2020, a GPU shortage began, resulting from an astronomically strong demand and industry-wide silicon chip supply issues.
Related Reading | Nvidia: Ethereum’s PoS Upgrade Will Set Back Graphics Card Demand
The Nvidia RTX 30 series launched which year with supply which wasn’t near enough to satisfy the demand, and thus immediately sold out. Scalpers rapidly started buying these cards to put them up for 2x or even 3x the MSRP.
At the same time, a crypto bull run still started, leading to much bigger profits for Ethereum miners. These miners bought Nvidia’s GPUs in bulk and added to the shortage.
Gamers, Nvidia’s target audience for these cards, couldn’t get their hands on any cards as a result of this shortage. Listening to their pleas, the company then decided to take measures which would discourage miners from using their GPUs.
This was although the RTX 30 LHR series launched, almost a year ago. These versions of the GPUs came with a limiter which cut the hash rate or the mining power of the card in half.
After all, these measures weren’t enough. Miners also found it profitable to mine Ethereum on these GPUs, and in the last few months they have even arrangementd out ways to unlock more of the hash rate from 50% to 70%.
It seems Nvidia’s efforts with LHR to hold off miners from buying their cards was in the end a failure, as suggested by the report. The graphics card shortage still hasn’t eased up and scalpers have remained to sell GPUs at ridiculously marked up prices.
Related Reading | Ethereum Miners Can Now Use 70% Of Nvidia RTX 30 GPU Hashrate, Thanks To This NBMiner Update
Some good news seems to be which industry experts think the chip shortage will immediately start to subside and GPU prices may have come down by year end.
The recent Ethereum (and the wider crypto market) crash may likewise help ease the demand from miners somewhat as mining profits maybe still shrink.
Ethereum (ETH) Price
At the time of writing, Ethereum’s price floats around $2.5k, up 11% in the remain seven days. Over the past month, the crypto has lost 31% in price.
The below chart shows the trend in the rate of Ethereum (ETH) above the carry on five days.
Ethereum has mostly developmentd sideways in the past few days | Source: Ethereum (ETH)USD on TradingView
Featured image from Unsplash.com, chart from TradingView.com
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