I'm not a big fan of limiting hardware to run only approved software. One day it's for limiting crypto mining, the next day it will be for limiting our ability to use strong encryption. It's a slippery slope.
Thats wonderful. Im sure a handful of victories can be listed. I highly doubt they wouldn't have found another way to purchase a car, though.
Anyway, I need not remind you of how big a boon cryptocurrencies have been to criminals and con artists. I think it should be pretty clear to anyone on this site why someone would be against them, just like it's clear to me why someone would be for them.
> I highly doubt they wouldn't have found another way to purchase a car, though
There was no cash. ATMs we’re dry.
> boon cryptocurrencies have been to criminals and con artists
It is probably overstated.
Orders of magnitude more criminal activity would be going through cash and even orgs that are meant to KYC, such as Western Union or even iTunes gift certificates. How many grannies are sending crypto vs providing logins to their bank accounts?
I’m not a crypto-apologist, I just haven’t heard any solid arguments against it that can’t also be said about cash or the traditional banking system.
paypal, venmo, cashapp etc would have worked the same. for all of them and for crypto you need to be in the ecosystem (need wallets, accounts, apps etc) and internet access.
All very US centric apps (with the exception of Paypal), but PayPal would gouge them on fees.
I guess what I want to get across is I’m not evangelising crypto, I just don’t necessarily want the space to die. I want them to keep iterating on the concept and see what other benefits can be generated.
If war broke out in my country I’d be glad I could take my money across the border by memorizing some words rather than dragging silver or possibly now worthless currency.
Got a link to that? Cryptocurrencies seem to me to be a poor choice in a situation where there might be issues with infrastructure like the electrical grid or internet connectivity.
Got a car today. Bought it with #bitcoin as all ATM's are almost cleared out and the credit card terminals are down. Hopefully, it will allow us to report a little from #Donbass while also keeping us safe and granting us an escape if things starts heating up here. [1]
A single transaction does not use the energy equivalent of a small country. Last estimation I've seen said they used around 1719.51kWh. That's still a whole damn lot (around 60 days of energy use of an average US household), but you won't power a country with it.
It won't, and it's a very important technology since it's the only way for humans to store digital property without relying on some government or corporation.
Also, it ever gets attacked, much more will be at stake, including your freedom for choosing what software can be run on your computer.
> It won't, and it's a very important technology since it's the only way for humans to store digital property without relying on some government or corporation.
Proof of work is the thing people have a problem with. There's lots of cryptographic techniques that you can use without proof of work.
And the only thing the likes of bitcoin need proof-of-work for is to avoid double-spending attacks.
Not quite sure what you mean by digital property. I can store valuable files just fine without proof-of-work. And we can copy them and give them to everyone in the world, too, at almost no cost.
Cryptocurrencies (and similar) allow you to keep a digital ledger. But the meaning of that ledger is still something we construct socially.
As a silly example: people agree to treat bitcoins as fungible. But they are perfectly traceable, so people could also agree to reject some specific bitcoin (and any descendent bitcoin that can be traced back to the banned ones; so if you mix them in a transaction, you just spread the taint).
For a slightly more real world example: I can imagine if Satoshi rose from the grave and held an auction to sell off the first bitcoin ever mined, he would get more than whatever bitcoin is currently trading for.
Cryptocurrencies, not cryptography. My software freedom is not dependent on the existence of cryptocurrencies. My hardware freedom is currently significantly hampered by them.
> Be on the side that empowers people with technology, not the side that wants to take it away.
I'm not really advocating for taking it away. I'm happy with a natural death or a market induced death. I'd definitely advocate for hardware that's terrible at mining because I'm not really being given a lot of options. You can't really say "freedom to use your hardware as you will" out of one side of your mouth while saying "you can't want hardware with restrictions" out of the other. It's a paradox. We both want the hardware that works for us, don't we? If NVidia can make cards that suck at mining, it's my economic freedom and right to choose to support that, and I would, just like it's your economic right and freedom to buy all hardware in existence to waste energy.
I can tell you 100% that cryptocurrencies are the opposite of empowering for me and those around me in my current life.
And that is where the contradiction exists — let’s say you get your way, and governments start arresting people doing arbitrary computation on their graphics card — let’s say hashing. That would very bad for everyone’s freedoms, software and hardware. The same anticryptocurrency playbook is what was used against cryptography in the 90s. Technology that challenges the powerful is dangerous!
It’s ok to not like cryptocurrency and not use it. Others can, and will. Be on the side that empowers people with technology, not the side that wants to take it away.
If we just arrest people for selling them for money instead, 99% of the problem would go away overnight. People can trade them as stamps or even barter them if they're so inclined, nobody has to be arrested for performing hash collisions on strings.
That reply probably sounded pretty smart in your head. Maybe you think I'm suggesting that we should outlaw or criminalize them? That makes sense based on your previous comment. But I said no such thing. Wishing it ill is not the same as taking away your freedom.
How on earth does it stop reliance on a government? Or specifically, prevent reliance on some entity monopolising force? This crypto wet dream, like all libertarian wet dreams, ultimately relies on there being a benevolent entity that prevents someone with a bigger gun than you from marching in and taking whatever they want.
There are plenty of examples of hardware being artificially constrained, and low hash rate GPUs are hardly the first. Slippery slope fallacy aside, why would you need a top of the line GPU to do strong encryption? That's something you can do with a pen and paper if you're motivated enough.
I just hacked my 3ds because nintendo is closing the eshop permanently. It uses GPUs to exploit something in the OS based off of known keys. The power needed to crack the code in 1-5 minutes requires powerful GPUs. Are you suggesting if NVIDIA decided to block something like this, I do it with pen and paper?
> I'm not a big fan of limiting hardware to run only approved software. One day it's for limiting crypto mining, the next day it will be for limiting our ability to use strong encryption. It's a slippery slope.
I'd assume that developing extra features costs money. If a buyer doesn't need a feature, why should they have to pay for it?
For example, if a gamer does not need drivers for a CAD program, or crypto features, why should the gamer have to foot the bill for developing these features, and suffer the consequences of them (e.g. scarcity due to cryptominers buying all gaming cards) ?
Because the hardware already does all of those things whether you paid for them or not. I don't care what the company thinks, if I pay for hardware I want the ability to use it to its fullest extent and without any question about my intentions. That is what it means to have computing freedom: I shouldn't have to answer to some bullshit corporate concerns over what I'm doing with my property.
It's one thing to test your chip and turn off defective parts so that you can sell a downgraded but still viable version and increase yields. Selling the exact same chips to everyone with software that locks out features just to segment the market is unacceptable and frankly quite offensive. It's the sort of thing that makes everyone wish they get cracked on principle, just to make things sane again.
> Because the hardware already does all of those things whether you paid for them or not.
AMD and Intel GPUs have the hardware capability of being great at CAD, but in practice they suck and nobody uses them because AMD and Intel do not have driver integration & certification with CAD software.
Why? Cause developing that costs money.
NVIDIA hardware and software only has this _because_ people that need it pay 10k$ for GFX cards that do these things.
If you'd wanted gamer cards to do these things, you'd need to add to the price tag of gamer cards the cost of developing and maintaining these things, which would make them more expensive.
The claim that this should be free because software and hardware costs nothing once you already have developed is illogical. CAD software, GPU driver software for CAD, and GPU hardware to meet CAD's demand, continues to evolve, which costs money.
There is a difference between hardware that simply doesn't support a use case and hardware that technically supports stuff but was artificially locked to no longer do so.
If the hardware was actually different then of course your argument would make sense, you could build cards that can only be used for a certain use case and sell those, but in that case you wouldn't have to lock down the card anyways
Intel have been selling cpus with binned cores for ages for performance reasons, and some IBM mainframes require you to license some features in hardware which you’ve purchases.
I know it’s counter to human nature to be denied use of the physical object that you bought, but it’s not new territory.
> The claim that this should be free because software and hardware costs nothing once you already have developed is illogical. CAD software, GPU driver software for CAD, and GPU hardware to meet CAD's demand, continues to evolve, which costs money.
I do agree with you, developers are expensive. And if i came across that way then that wasn't my intention.
If a gaming CPU doesn't support CAD tasks, never did so in the past and nobody expects them to suddenly do so.
However, what i personally was referring to is not lacking Software Support for a certain feature set but software throttling of Hardware.
Sadly it is something that happens a lot. Phones throttling because they received software updates, graphics cards pretending to be artificially slow because drivers include code specifically to slow them down.
In my opinion there is a big difference between "Sorry, we don't support that use case, but good luck to you" and "We are going to invest time to stop you from doing X"
The first is fine, it happens all the time. The second is (in my eyes) not.
Then as other have mentioned there are two options for GPU vendors:
* Hardware unblocked: GPU can be used for mining, scarcity becomes worse, good luck finding gaming GPUs for less than 2000$ for as long as it is profitable to use them for mining (~2 years maybe?)
* Hardware blocked: GPU can't be used for mining (profitably), gaming GPUs can be bought by gamers (still scarcity due to COVID, but not as bad)
The main reason only NVIDIA does this, and AMD and Intel don't isn't because of "freedom", but rather because AMD and Intel GPUs are so bad at compute that nobody can use them for anything but gaming anyways.
Independently of whether one agrees with nvidia's decision here, and whether it actually achieved its goal or not, the thought process isn't really hard to follow.
And I mean, before LHR people were complaining that miners were buying all nvidia gpus, and they couldn't get any, and asking nvidia to do something. nvidia did something, and now that people got to get the GPUs for gaming, they are complaining that they can't mine on them, which is probably the only reason they actually were able to get one in the first place.
So :shrug:. To be honest, it was foreseeable that people were going to complain either way.
Isn’t this the case in many different products? E.g. I can buy a car which has certain features “locked”, because it’s cheaper for the manufacturing company to have a single production line, and helps ease supply chain / inventory management as well.
