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Comment by Alekhine | Hacker News Reader

It'll be a good opportunity to see some nice hardware hacks, sure. But I'd guess serious miners don't really wanna deal with that shit and will just buy the miner-specific cards or use ASICs. This measure just raises the bar enough to make it a hassle.

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Serious miners will go to great lengths to improve their efficiency by even a fraction of 1%. They will absolutely patch some drivers if it gets them better hashes/kwh (which it will or Nvidia wouldn't do this).

Serious miners are buying Antminers, not video cards.

Antminers are for mining Bitcoin, GPUs are mostly used for Ethereum.

https://www.coindesk.com/bitmain-antminer-e9-asic-ethereum-m...

ethereum is asic-resistant, not asic-proof. It doesn't mean you can't make ASICs, just that ASICs are <10x as efficient as an equivalent-node GPU, vs millions of times more efficient for bitcoin/etc.

Are serious miners buying supply constrained GPUs?

The reason they are supply constrained is because miners are buying most (near all?) of the available stock.

Miners are already doing hacks like this, i.e ETHlargement pill (which alters memory timings on 1080/1080Ti cards to improve ETH mining).

We’ll see a cottage industry of modders. Turning a $300 thing into a $600 thing should be a viable business.

Though I’ve seen some really sketchy mods before… can’t find it at the moment, but one involved taking a dremel to the chip to break an internal pad/link.

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