Update from March 16: For a few days, more and more reports have been circulating about an alleged hack intended to unhinge Nvidia’s mining lock. Finally the Japanese website PCWatchwho have tried the “hack” themselves but do not want to describe the process.
The supposed “hack” has now been confirmed. The colleagues from Computer base managed to recreate it – and did not need anything more than the latest beta driver Geforce 470.05. No new video bios, no hack and still the full mining power for the crypto currency Ethereum on an RTX 3060!
Update from March 12th, at 10:00 a.m .: Thanks to a friendly tip from our reader »Wallenstein«, we became aware of a change in the situation: So reported, among other things Wccftechthat the screenshot shown is not supposed to be evidence of a hack.
It seems a lot more as if the miner used an algorithm that is not affected by Nvidia’s mining ban: Octopus instead of Ethereum. Nvidia only limited the hash rate for Ethereum, it said.
Original message from March 12, at 9:40 a.m .: It wasn’t long ago that Nvidia announced special graphics cards for crypto miners, which should indirectly ensure that regular graphics accelerators get into the hands of us gamers. At the same time, the hash rate, which is so important for mining virtual currencies, was limited on the new RTX 3060.
From a so-called handshake between video bios and graphics card driver was the talk. He should make sure that the miners cannot circumvent the restrictions. Here again the answer from Nvidia’s Senior PR Manager Bryan Del Rizzo to a question from colleague Ryan Smith from Anandtech:
Link to Twitter content
Mining lock cracked after all?
But now it seems to have turned out differently. In the network, a report is making the rounds according to which Nvidia’s advertised mining lock has long since been unhinged by hackers. Has Nvidia promised too much?
The only supposed “piece of evidence” is a screenshotwhich apparently came from a Vietnamese miner. Accordingly, there are eight Nvidia Geforce RTX 3060 in his rack, each delivering between 45 and 46 MH / s – MH / s stands for millions of hashes per second.
Link to Facebook content
Actually, the hash rate of the RTX 3060 should only be about half – So a good 23 MH / s – and therefore uninteresting for mining Ethereum and Co., because it is inefficient.
But be careful of too early mockery: There is still no really reliable evidence of the alleged hack. We’ll keep you up to date!
What is the hash rate?
Put simply, the hash rate indicates the speed with which a graphics card, for example, can perform the complex arithmetic operations to open up a new block. We explain this in a little more detail in the following article:
more on the subject
Ethereum 2.0 could be a boon for gamers
There we also look into the question of why a fundamental change in the cryptocurrency Ethereum could turn out to be a real blessing for us gamers.
