In mid-May 2021, the American multinational technology company Nvidia Corporation revealed that it added a hashrate limiter to curb the use of cryptocurrency mining with its graphics processing units (GPUs). However, crypto miners now say the move was pointless, and the mining organization Nicehash details that the hashrate limiter scheme introduced by Nvidia “did not discourage miners at all.”
Nvidia’s hashrate limiter didn’t stop crypto miners from using the products
Last year, Bitcoin.com News reported on Nvidia’s “Lite Hash Rate” (LHR) technology, when the graphics card maker tried to stop crypto miners from mining its GPUs to mine assets. digital. Nvidia applied LHR to three specific GPU products, and the company said the motivation was to get its card back into the hands of gamers. Eight months later, reports indicate that LHR technology has done very little to prevent crypto miners from using these specific Nvidia devices.
The cryptocurrency mining Platform Nicehash told pcmag.com that LHR technology “did not discourage miners at all.” Moreover, a crypto miner named Blake Teeter from Colorado told pcmag.com’s Michael Kan that the LHR tech did not stop him from purchasing the GPUs and leveraging them for crypto mining purposes. Teeter said he added LHR-based Nvidia GPUs to his GPU farm, which gets $4.5K per month in ethereum (ETH) profits.
“Yeah, I think LHR was unnecessary,” Teeter remarked and further noted that LHR-based Nvidia GPUs “is not a deal breaker for miners.”
LHR-Based GPU Miners Sold at the Same Rates, Ethereum Hashrate Coasting Along at Record Highs
Meanwhile, a week after Nvidia introduced the Lite Hash Rate products, the company admitted that it made $155 million from crypto mining chips in Q1 2021. At the time, Nvidia disclosed that cryptocurrency miners had boosted sales, but the company also explained it was trying to deter miners from using specific products. A digital currency miner named Tim Tarshis told Kan that he owns 30 LHR RTX 3060 Nvidia GPUs and he bought them because “everyone was flipping them.”
Tarshis further stated that LHR technology does not make GPUs cheaper, and he agreed that Lite Hash Rate products “did nothing” to discourage people from using these devices to mine digital assets. . “A lot of people, miners and scalpers, were still buying cards at the same rates as before,” Tarshis added.
Currently, ethereum (ETH) is up more than 95% year-to-date and the network’s hashrate has tapped all-time highs this year. At the time of writing, the Ethereum hashrate is above 1 petahash per second (PH/s) or 1,038,957,431,086,586 hashes per second (H/s).
Until Ethereum moves from a proof-of-work (PoW) chain to a full proof-of-stake (PoS) model, it looks like miners will leverage any device they can use to reap profits. . If Nvidia’s LHR products are still producing ETH and other GPU-minable crypto assets, they will likely be used for these purposes.
