Items tagged with cryptocurrency
When people think of cryptocurrencies, they typically think of the big players like Ethereum or Bitcoin, both of which hit new heights this year. Besides these two major cryptos, there is a whole world of alternates out there that people have created, including a smaller meme-coin called Dogecoin. This coin was previously lower than a penny earlier this year and then shot up to $0.43 yesterday, so what exactly is going on here? Dogecoin is a cryptocurrency created by engineers Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus back in 2013 as a fun poke at the other cryptocurrencies coming up at the time. The Doge mascot, according to KnowYourMeme, is "a slang term for 'dog' that is primarily associated with...
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We reported earlier this week that NVIDIA would ship a new revision of the GeForce RTX 3060 desktop GPU -- GA106-302 -- that will put more stringent measures in place to cripple mining for cryptocurrencies like Ethereum (ETH). While the newest GeForce RTX 3060 offerings will likely be the first of these fortified, anti-mining graphics cards, they won't be the last. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti has entered mass production, and it's alleged that early qualification samples had a crypto mining limiter that was just as easy to bypass as currently shipping GeForce RTX 3060 cards. However, GeForce RTX 3080 Ti GPUs currently in mass production with updated firmware are no longer able to use the 470.05 beta...
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It looks as though NVIDIA will take another stab at a cryptocurrency mining limiter for its GeForce RTX 3060 after its current solution was defeated via multiple methods. The current GeForce RTX 3060 features the GA106-300 GPU, but a report alleges that a newer revision, GA106-302, is on the way to reenable the limiter. This information reportedly comes from a Taiwanese graphics card manufacturer, which says that NVIDIA has already discontinued the GA106-300. NVIDIA's switch to the GA106-302 thwarts miners on two fronts. First of all, the 470.05 beta driver currently used by Ethereum miners is incompatible with the new GPU revision, which shuts down that popular workaround. HKEPC states that...
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We got our first look at Gigabyte's first NVIDIA CMP HX card back in early March when a single photo leaked. Today, Gigabyte is ready to get official with the cryptocurrency mining card, designated as the NVIDIA CMP 30HX D6 6G (GV-N30HXD6-6G). As we had already surmised, the CMP 30HX D6 6G is based on NVIDIA's Turing TU116-100 GPU. The GPU features 1408 CUDA cores, a boost clock of 1785MHz, and 6GB of 14 Gbps GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit memory bus. There are no video outputs on the card, and it features a WindForce 2X cooling system with counterrotating 90mm fan blades. There's also a composite copper heat pipe to keep the GPU [relatively] cool. Not surprisingly, given the stresses that these cards...
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It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that cryptocurrencies are soaring to new highs. The valuation increases have also brought in a wealth of individuals and companies looking to cash in by mining for cryptocurrencies like Ethereum with GPUs that gamers would have otherwise bought. The huge cryptocurrency run culminated today with a cumulative valuation topping $2 trillion. Not surprisingly, Bitcoin and Ethereum make up the bulk of that $2 trillion figure, with the former hitting a 24-hour high of $58,243 with a total market cap of $1.10 trillion. Ethereum, on the other hand, had a 24-hour high of $2,118 with a market cap of $244.38 billion. Rounding out the top five cryptocurrencies...
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Late last month, we reported on a trend of rising cybersecurity incidents worldwide that could lead to the end of some businesses. Now, the latest cyberattack victim is Microsoft-owned GitHub, with reports of cybercriminals leveraging GitHub cloud infrastructure to mine cryptocurrency. Since at least the Fall of 2020, attackers have been abusing a feature called GitHub Actions, which lets users automate tasks and workflows once an event happens within a repository. Once triggered, GitHub Actions can spool up a VM or a container to typically test out code in a live environment. In a phone call to The Record, Dutch security engineer Justin Perdok explained that “at least one threat actor...
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NVIDIA hoped that the GeForce RTX 3060 would represent a new era for long-battered gamers, during which cryptocurrency miners wouldn't rain on their parade by hoarding cards. Through a combination of drivers, BIOS, and hardware modifications, NVIDIA limited the Ethereum hash rate of the GeForce RTX 3060 by roughly 50 percent to deter crypto miners. Unfortunately for NVIDIA, a beta driver allowed users to bypass the ETH limiter, and a dummy HDMI plug allowed users to bypass the limiter in multi-GPU rigs. Now, we're learning of a crypto miner that was able to amass a total of seven Zotac GeForce RTX 3060 Twin Edge OC to install in a single rig. Since the beta driver trick doesn't work in multi-GPU...
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Cryptocurrency is slowly but surely growing in popularity with a broader global audience. Now that Elon Musk has begun to accept Bitcoin for Tesla purchases, that trend is only going to continue. As such, PayPal is jumping on the bandwagon of accepting crypto as a payment method for anything. Perhaps people will finally convert and have a use for all that Dogecoin they bought this year. Announced today, PayPal’s “Checkout With Crypto” feature will allow users to use their cryptocurrency at millions of businesses that support PayPal payments in the coming months. This builds on PayPal customers’ ability to buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrency with their PayPal wallets, allowing...
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In February, we reported that Tesla went in on Bitcoin, investing $1.5 billion and laying the groundwork to accept payments using the cryptocurrency. Since then, Bitcoin is up over $13,000, which has earned Elon Musk’s company in the neighborhood of $480 million. Now, Tesla intends to increase its amassed wealth by allowing new Tesla purchases to be completed using Bitcoin. In a brief series of Tweets overnight, Musk announced that Tesla is now accepting Bitcoin payments within the US. Later this year, the feature will roll out worldwide so anyone can use their cryptocurrency wallet to make a Tesla purchase. As one astute Twitter user amusingly pointed out, you can now...
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Over the weekend, we heard a report that NVIDIA could repurpose its flagship Ampere A100 GPU for mining purposes. According to the rumor, the new GPU would sit atop the CMP HX family of dedicated mining GPUs. At the time, we had some serious concerns about the possibility of an A100-based CMP HX card, mainly with its price. The PCIe version of the A100 is pushing $11,000, which puts it far out of reach for miners, even if it were to offer unmatched Ethereum mining performance. However, today's report sheds some additional light on the alleged mining GPU, including its performance. NVIDIA Ampere A100 PCIe Card Hardware leaker I_Leak_VN alleges that this new A100-based card will...
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There's a crazy rumor floating around the Twittersphere concerning NVIDIA's dedicated cryptocurrency mining GPU family. As you recall, NVIDIA announced the four-SKU CMP HX family of mining GPUs back in February, reportedly based on a mix of Turing and Ampere GPUs. The highest performing family member is the CMP 90HX, allegedly based on the GeForce RTX 3080 while delivering an Ethereum hash rate of 86 MH/s. According to hardware leaker kopite7kimi, NVIDIA is looking to release a CMP HX card based on the bonkers Ampere A100 GPU. The A100 sits at the top of NVIDIA's Ampere GPU stack and is primarily designed for deep learning operations. The A100 is a bandwidth monster thanks...
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Earlier this week, we learned that NVIDIA's cryptocurrency mining limiter on the GeForce RTX 3060 was easily bypassed using the 470.05 beta driver. The limiter can slash Ethereum mining performance by 50 percent or more, which was supposed to reduce the graphics card's appeal to miners. While the beta driver seems to be perfectly fine for use in a single-GPU system, it doesn't kill the limiter if the GeForce RTX 3060 is used in a multi-GPU mining rig. Hardwareluxx discovered that the ETH limiter was still active with the 470.05 beta driver if a GeForce RTX 3060 is used as a secondary adapter, with a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti acting as the primary. In this case, the ETH hash...
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If you've been keeping up with the news surrounding the cryptocurrency mining craze, then you know that there are currently two separate "tracks" on the NVIDIA side of the equation. On the one hand, NVIDIA has introduced the CMP HX Series of headless graphics cards explicitly built for mining for cryptocurrencies like Ethereum. On the other hand, the company has implemented a mining limiter on the newly released GeForce RTX 3060,which cuts the ETH hash rate in half (although that limiter was quickly defeated with a beta driver). With NVIDIA using a combination of hardware, BIOS, and driver tweaks to cripple mining performance -- and hence cut down on demand from that segment...
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NVIDIA said that its first CMP HX GPUs would begin shipping during Q1 2021, and it appears that at least one retailer is jumping the gun on sales. Retailer Microless listed the Palit CMP 30HX (part number NE630HX017J9-1160X) earlier this week but quickly removed the listing. The CMP 30HX is reportedly based on Turing architecture, and Palit's card features 6GB of 14Gbps GDDR6 memory on a 192-bit interface along with base/boost clocks of 1530MHz and 1785MHz, respectively. Looking at those clocks, the CMP 30HX is most assuredly a repurposed GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER graphics card. In this case, NVIDIA uses GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER GPUs deemed defective to be used in these headless...
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Leading up to the launch of the GeForce RTX 3060, NVIDIA made it clear that the GeForce RTX 3060 would have limitations in place to make it unpalatable to cryptocurrency miners. GeForce and Radeon GPUs are popular with Ethereum miners, which has exacerbated the GPU shortage plaguing the industry. NVIDIA's solution was to implement a combination of hardware, BIOS, and driver modifications to slash the ETH hash rate of the GeForce RTX 3060 in half. However, as we found out yesterday, this limiter was effectively disabled without much work on the user's part. A GeForce RTX 3060 owner only needs to install the 470.05 beta driver, which automatically removes the hash rate limiter. ...
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Last week we learned that NVIDIA's Ethereum crypto mining limiter might have possibly been broken. However, we quickly discovered that a GeForce RTX 3060 using the Octopus algorithm with the Conflux alt-coin was incorrectly cited as mining for ETH. Now, there is more evidence that the inevitable has finally happened. The folks over at PC Watch claim to have cut through NVIDIA's ETH restrictions, and it is simple to achieve. According to the report [via Google Translate], "The specific method is not introduced here, but it does not require modification of the driver or BIOS, and anyone can easily do it with a little effort." Given that there doesn't appear to...
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When it comes to Ethereum mining, NVIDIA has been getting a bulk of the attention in recent weeks for all the wrong reasons. Its newly released GeForce RTX 3060 has a cryptocurrency mining limiter enabled (crippling performance by up to 50 percent) in hardware/BIOS/drivers, and it's rumored that future GeForce RTX cards will have a similar limitation. But NVIDIA GPUs aren't the only ones capable of mining for cryptocurrency. AMD's previous-generation RDNA cards were well suited for Ethereum mining, however, its current-generation RDNA 2-based cards are not nearly as efficient. The alleged Ethereum mining hash rate for the upcoming Radeon RX 6700 XT has been revealed. Although these...
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In mid-February, NVIDIA announced that it would unleash a new GPU family called the Crypto Mining Processor (CMP HX). To ease some pressure off GeForce RTX 30 supplies, NVIDIA is pushing the CMP HX family as an excellent option for enthusiasts looking to mine for cryptocurrencies like Ethereum. As NVIDIA explained at the time, the GPUs "don't meet the specifications required of a GeForce GPU and, thus, don't impact the availability of GeForce GPUs to gamers." Just as NVIDIA said in February, Gigabyte is one of its OEM partners that will produce CMP HX cards. Today, we're getting our first look at Gigabyte's CMP 30HX card. You shouldn't be too surprised to see that this card doesn't...
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Before the GeForce RTX 3060 officially launched, NVIDIA made the somewhat surprising announcement that the GPU would have a built-in hash rate limiter when mining for cryptocurrency. According to NVIDIA, this was done to limit the appeal of the GeForce RTX 3060 to crypto miners and leave more supply for the intended audience: gamers. NVIDIA said that it implemented the hash rate limiter through a combination of BIOS, driver, and hardware modifications, which would "detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm" and cut performance by up to 50 percent. In the real world, CryptoLeo witnessed a roughly 38 percent reduction in Ethereum mining performance with...
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Back in mid-February, NVIDIA announced its Crypto Mining Processor (CMP) HX family. Now it looks as though AMD may be countering with some headless Radeon GPU action of its own. The news comes to us from the new AMDGPU kernel patch driver notes for Linux 5.12. The pertinent piece of information for us today is the appearance of a new NV12 (Navi 12) SKU. According to the report, this would be a new headless graphics card based on first-generation Navi architecture (RDNA). The card would lack support for Video Core Next (VCN) which further adds to the rumors that this could be AMD's answer to CMP HX. NVIDIA previously stated that its CMP HX cards feature GPUs that didn't pass the grade...
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John McAfee, the man behind McAfee Antivirus, has quite a long and storied history, from running for president to running from authorities. Now, McAfee is getting a few more items tacked on to his absurd life story: cryptocurrency fraud and money laundering. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged John McAfee for “promoting investments in initial coin offerings (ICOs) to his Twitter followers without disclosing that he was paid to do so.” The allegations stem from McAfee, who seemingly “promoted multiple ICOs on Twitter, allegedly pretending to be impartial and independent even though he was paid more than $23 million in digital assets for the promotions.”...
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Over the past few months, we've heard many rumors surrounding the alleged GeForce RTX 3080 Ti. This is NVIDIA's next high-end graphics card that will reportedly fit in between the existing GeForce RTX 3080 and the GeForce RTX 3090. When we last visited GeForce RTX 3080 Ti rumors, it was alleged that the card would have 20GB of GDDR6x memory and 10,496 CUDA cores with base/boost clocks of 1396MHz and 1695MHz, respectively. Hardware leaker kopite7kimi is now claiming that the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti will instead have just 10,240 CUDA cores (compared to 8,704 CUDA cores for the standard GeForce RTX 3080). kopite7kimi is also alleging that the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti will feature 12GB of 19Gbps...
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