Nvidia's anti-cryptomining GPUs have finally been 100% unlocked:
It took almost an entire year from their initial release, but the LHR (low hashrate) versions of Nvidia's RTX 30 series graphics cards have finally been completely unlocked by a mining software called Nicehash, restoring each card's respective mining capabilities.
Many of the best graphics cards were nearly impossible to find available to buy over the last two years because of the global chip shortage, a broader supply chain crisis at ports around the world and demand for consumer tech putting even more pressure on the availability of semiconductors needed by AMD and Nvidia for their products.
Part of this demand also included cryptominers who were buying up the available stock in bulk of popular GPUs during the height of the recent crypto currency boom. And while there are mixed opinions about how this affected overall availability for gamers and building hobbyists, there was certainly no love lost between the two groups which resulted in Team Green putting measures in place to make its consumer graphics cards less desirable to those hoping to use them to mine currencies such as Ethereum.
[...] As reported by WCCFTech, NiceHash has now announced that it can utilize 100% of available mining speeds using these previously restricted Ampere-series cards [...]
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When Canadian developer Peter Todd found out that a new HBO documentary, Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery, was set to identify him as Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, he was mostly just pissed. "This was clearly going to be a circus," Todd told WIRED in an email.
[...]
The mystery has proved all the more irresistible for the trove of bitcoin Satoshi is widely believed to have controlled, suspected to be worth many billions of dollars today. When the documentary was released on October 8, Todd joined a long line of alleged Satoshis.
[...]
Since the documentary aired, Todd has repeatedly and categorically denied that he created Bitcoin: "For the record, I am not Satoshi," he alleges. "I think Cullen made the Satoshi accusation for marketing. He needed a way to get attention for his film."
[...]
The search for the creator of Bitcoin has dragged into its orbit a colorful cast of characters, among them Hal Finney, recipient of the first ever bitcoin transaction; Adam Back, designer of a precursor technology cited in the Bitcoin white paper; and cryptographer Nick Szabo, to name just a few. Journalists at Newsweek, The New York Times, and WIRED, among others, have all taken stabs at solving the Satoshi riddle. But irrefutable proof has never been unearthed.
[...]
The case for Sassaman was first outlined in 2021 by Evan Hatch, founder of crypto gaming platform Worlds. Whenever speculation about Sassaman bubbles periodically to the surface, the spotlight is thrown on his widow, software developer Meredith Patterson, who believes the theory is unfounded."People used to be really fucking nosy and entitled. I'd get people writing me with a two-page list of dates and locations, asking where I was at such and such a time or place," says Patterson. "Where do you get off? A complete stranger walking up to a widow and trying to interrogate her. It's like, fuck off Sergeant Joe Friday."
[...]
"I was relieved for myself and my family that they named Peter Todd," says Patterson. "But I feel sorry for Peter Todd. Frankly, nobody deserves getting a target painted on their back."
[...]
Todd expects that "continued harassment by crazy people" will become the indefinite status quo. But he says the potential personal safety implications are his chief concern—and the reason he has gone into hiding.
[...]
Hoback sees things very differently. Though there have been cases where violent extortionists have targeted crypto holders, plenty of people have been unmasked as Satoshi before—and nothing terrible is known to have happened to them, he argues. "I think the idea that it puts their life [at risk] is a little overblown," says Hoback.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Tuesday May 10 2022, @09:02PM (6 children)
I keep hearing x-bit encryption will take gigayears to crack. Assuming Nvidea has somewhat qualified crypto types vetting the code, then either A) Nvidea cheaped out on crypto types; or B) x-bit encryption doesn't take gigayears to crack.
I'm voting for B, as modern crypto is based on elliptic curves with mysterious numbers provided by the NSA, arrived at by, um, trust us, these are good.
Trump's Golden Rule: It's someone else's fault, and they owe me a lot of money.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Opportunist on Tuesday May 10 2022, @09:43PM (3 children)
True, but considering the amount of waste heat these things produce, the time for the heat death of the universe has also been moved forwards.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday May 10 2022, @10:01PM (2 children)
Eh, it's fine, each GPU has a wormhole into which it dumps all the waste heat. The heat sink is just for show and to keep you warm, really.
(Score: 3, Funny) by stretch611 on Tuesday May 10 2022, @10:40PM
Oh, you got the good kind...
The bad kind works like a 6502 in performance terms...
Its Heat Sink is the receptacle for the waste heat coming from other universes.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday May 11 2022, @01:34AM
That's fine, until the pocket universe collapses and destroys the solar system.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday May 11 2022, @07:54AM
What makes you think this has anything to do with encryption?
Are you confusing proof-of-work (which is not designed to be impossible, because that would make proving you did the work necessary impossible) with actual, proper encryption/decryption?
Sorry, but all the maths says that public-key encryption is perfectly fine, at least until quantum computing becomes significant, and even then there are QC-safe algorithms already in OpenSSL and in use on websites.
Those giga-years are not giga-years, by the way. They are exa-years, and beyond.
And nothing has yet "broken" public-key encryption in any significant manner whatsoever, precisely because that maths still holds.
If anything, elliptic curve is the trojan-horse, brought in to "replace" public-key and quite likely the common curves are indeed compromised or weakened. But there are an infinity of other, presumably more secure, curves to choose from. And always will be.
(Score: 2) by JustNiz on Wednesday May 11 2022, @06:14PM
FYI There's no 'e' in NVIDIA.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 10 2022, @10:41PM (2 children)
Will nvidia refund the 50% that bitcoin losers lost since November? Maybe give some coupons for discount on your next mining rig purchase?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 10 2022, @11:13PM
Use you bitcoins to buy NFTs and you'll make it all back overnight.
(Score: 2) by JustNiz on Wednesday May 11 2022, @06:17PM
Why should they? no-one is forcing you to buy/use their products for mining. And it's not like they made a secret of intentionally degrading mining performance.
If you bought a crippled nvidia GPU for mining, its all on you.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by unauthorized on Wednesday May 11 2022, @04:07AM
I swear to Cthulhu, when humanity finally kills itself with with nuclear weapons and our infrastructure slowly dies off, the very last computer on the planet with it's final processor cycle will be mining Bitcoin. A perfect allegory for our demise.