Items tagged with cryptocurrency mining
As winter looms, authorities in China are hoping to put the freeze on cryptocurrency mining by individuals who are operating in defiance of the crypto ban. The difficult part is catching them. Some of those who have chosen to ignore the ban and continue mining digital coins have taken various measures to fly under the watchful eye of the Chinese government. While the gap has narrowed over the past couple of years, mining is China is where it is most prevalent of any territory, accounting for 46 percent of the overall hash rate as of April 2021, according to data tracked by the University of Cambridge and its Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index. The United States sits in a distant second place...
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It has been a frustratingly long time since graphics cards were routinely in stock and selling at or near MSRP. This is largely a two-part problem, consisting of (A) a global shortage of silicon, and (B) cryptocurrency miners snapping up stock. Scalpers aren't making things any better either, though if not for the other factors, they wouldn't have much luck hawking GPUs at insane markups. During a recent webcast at the Deutsche Bank of 2021 Technology Conference, AMD CFO Devinder Kumar touched on both points. AMD is doing well for itself these days, and now routinely posts strong financial results each quarter. In its most recent quarter, for example, AMD saw a 99 percent year-over-year increase...
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Some kids do extra household chores, open up lemonade or baked goods stands, or recycle bottles to earn a bit of cash. Others get involved in cryptocurrency mining. Two siblings in Frisco, Texas have started their own cryptocurrency mining company and are making more than $30,000 a month. Fourteen year old Ishaan Thakur and nine year old Aanya Thakur began mining for cryptocurrency this past March. They originally were interested in investing in cryptocurrency, but could not afford to do so. They therefore set up an old gaming computer in their garage with the help of their father and YouTube tutorials to begin mining. They originally were going to mine for Bitcoin, but were worried that...
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Nobody has been able to fully get around the hash rate limiter NVIDIA implemented on its GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards, though the developer of NBMiner has figured out a way to restore some of the performance. And with the latest NBMiner update, the developer is claiming their software can restore up to 70 percent of the maximum unlocked hash rate. This is good news for miners, and obviously bad news for gamers who are frustrated at the lack of GPUs that are available for anywhere close to MSRP. To be fair, the shortage is not entirely the fault of GPU mining, though it has definitely contributed to some extent. Things could ease in the coming months too, though, between China's crackdown...
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One of AMD's add-in board partners, Sapphire, appears to have released a graphics card for cryptocurrency mining that is equipped with not one, but two Radeon RX 570 GPUs, if a new leak is not pulling our collective legs. Sapphire has made no such announcement, mind you, possibly because it wants to keep the release on the down low. That would be understandable, considering that crypto-mining is at least contributing to the general unavailability of graphics cards. Releasing a mining card in the midst of it all could be frowned upon by some gamers, and Sapphire may not want to attract that kind of ire. Which again, assumes this leak is legitimate in the first place. A regular Radeon RX 570 is...
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Is AMD's newly minted Radeon RX 6600 XT the most efficient cryptocurrency mining graphics card ever produced? It is probably too early to tell (considering the card only released to retail today), but according to a set of cryptocurrency mining hash rates and energy consumption figures posted to Reddit, it is the efficiency champ. If you have not done so already, be sure to check out our Radeon RX 6600 XT review. We do not get into mining performance, but you will otherwise find plenty of gaming and graphics benchmarks, including a varied range of DirectX and Vulkan titles. We also evaluate the card's real-time ray tracing prowess and overclocking potential. What about mining performance, though?...
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Have you looked up the prices of graphics cards lately? Don't do it, not unless you want to be depressed. We're not talking about MSRPs, mind you, but jacked up pricing on the part of marketplace sellers and scalpers on eBay. Part of the reason is because of cryptocurrency mining, but following a crackdown in China, GPU prices might finally return to Earth. That is the optimistic view, anyway (and probably too optimistic). However, China's annoyance at cryptocurrency mining is very real, and its ban on mining digital currencies could have a tangible impact on the market at large, and others (like GPUs) that are associated with it. That's because China has been a major hub for mining. It is estimated...
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NVIDIA is hoping that applying a hash rate limiter to some of its graphics cards will help get more units in the hands of actual PC gamers, rather than miners, who the company is serving with CMP HX parts. The newly minted GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is one of those cards. It is not a great option for mining Ethereum (relative to the card's cost), and it looks like the hash rate limiter nerfs a few other cryptocurrencies as well. Hopefully this attempt works out better than it did for the GeForce RTX 3060. NVIDIA attempted to gimp mining performance for that card as well, but the effort was quickly undone when a developer driver that removed the hash rate limiter found its way to the web. It did not...
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Though cryptocurrency mining is becoming less profitable by the day, those who still have the hardware may as well use it. However, it sucks up a lot of energy and dumps a lot of heat, which suspiciously looks like a marijuana grow house, as it turns out. Earlier this month, police in London were tipped off to a building within the Great Bridge Industrial Estate, Sandwell. Using drone surveillance, police saw a characteristic heat signature and people regularly going in and out. Therefore, when the police raided the location on May 18th, they were expecting a cannabis farm, but that is not what they found. Upon entry, they saw shelves full of up to 100 application-specific integrated circuit...
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China is one of the largest cryptocurrency mining countries in the world, in part due to its sheer population, cheap electricity, and easy access to electronics. This year, Bitcoin and other large cryptocurrencies took off alongside new coins like Chia, which saw immense popularity in China. Now, the Chinese government has cracked down on cryptos overall, and miners are pulling out of the country, leading to a sharp price slump across the board. Will this trend continue, or will cryptocurrencies recover in traditional fashion? Last Friday, Chinese Vice Premier Liu He announced a crackdown on Bitcoin mining and trading to “fend off financial risks.” This announcement came just...
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Cryptocurrency mining was once just a way to use extra CPU cycles, but it has since become an economy in and of itself with a dark underbelly. Over the years, black-hat hackers have adapted cryptocurrency mining to make money for themselves using other peoples’ resources via malware. This year, Microsoft recorded a spike in this activity, likely fueled by the extreme rise in the price of all cryptocurrencies. Now, the company is working with Intel to help prevent cryptojacking with machine learning and Microsoft Defender For Endpoint. Cryptojacking is the term coined for when an attacker deploys a crypto-miner as a malicious payload rather than other options such as ransomware. Considering...
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As of late, there has been a run on graphics cards due to cryptocurrency miners looking to cash in on mining for whatever coin that is the new hotness on the market. However, the next crypto-driven shortage could very well be hard drives and SSDs with a new breed of cryptocurrencies that operate by "proof of space" and time using available drive storage space. While this is not necessarily a new idea, the technology has begun to take off and it seems will likely begin to spread worldwide. In 2014, the pioneer of proof of space, also known as proof of capacity, was Burstcoin, created by an anonymous developer and now managed by several groups. They describe proof-of-capacity as an “energy...
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The lingering GPU shortage is frustrating for people who play games on PC, because graphics cards are just so hard to come by—they're either always out of stock, or selling for grossly inflated prices set by marketplace sellers. In case you were wondering, however, NVIDIA is doing just fine. More than just fine, NVIDIA expects its first quarter revenue to exceed its previous guidance, with a big uptick in cryptocurrency mining GPUs contributing to the company's bottom line. Previously, NVIDIA estimated its first quarter revenue for its CMP (Cryptocurrency Mining Processors) would fetch $50 million from buyers. Higher than expected demand has now driven that estimate to $150 million, or...
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It has become increasingly difficult to secure even the most basic entry-level current generation graphics from the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 and AMD Radeon RX 6000 families. Even last-generation cards like the GeForce RTX 20 and Radeon RX 5000 series are in short supply as both gamers and cryptocurrency miners compete for limited inventory. NVIDIA's solution to this problem is to cripple Ethereum mining performance on its GeForce RTX 3060 (and future) graphics cards to dissuade crypto miners and push them towards an all-new Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) family of GPUs. Not surprisingly, the initial run of CMP 30HX cards has already proven to be quite popular. Now, Hong Kong authorities claim...
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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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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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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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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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Have you looked at the price of Bitcoin lately? The volatile currency ballooned to nearly $40,000 in recent weeks and is now hovering at a little over $37,000. This has prompted renewed interest in cryptocurrency mining (not that it ever dissipated completely), and if demand is high enough (J.P. Morgan reckons it could eventually hit a $146,000 valuation to rival gold investments), NVIDIA said it would once again manufacture GPUs specifically aimed at miners. For the most part, mining Bitcoin is a tough gig for the casual user, in terms of making any meaningful money. Specialized ASIC hardware rules the day. However, there are some bigger operations that still employ scores of GPUs for mining....
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At a cursory glance, it may seem like cryptocurrency mining is firmly in the rear view mirror, along with all of the unwanted side effects (GPU shortages, browser hijacking, and so forth), but not so fast. Bitcoin and other virtual currencies have seen a sharp rise in recent weeks. Does that mean we have to worry about sneaky web code using our browsers to mine cryptocurrencies? That remains to be seen, though to prevent that sort of thing, Mozilla is making some changes to Firefox. Mozilla stated in a blog post that it has added a feature to block fingerprinting and cryptomining in Firefox Nightly, as an option for users to turn on. Firefox Nightly is a pre-release version of Firefox that gets...
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It wasn't too long ago that the world seemed to have gone crazy mining for cryptocurrency. Crypto miners were gobbling up all the GPUs to the point where gamers were unable to get their hands on a graphics card unless they paid insanely prices for them. All of that time and money went into optimizing crypto mining machines, but now that the crypto craze has faded, many systems sit idle. What to do with those mothballed crypto mining machines? Vectordash has a fantastic idea that is quite the turnaround for gamers. Vectordash is a streaming game service that charges $28 per month and has the goal of letting you play any game you want on any computer you own with unused crypto mining...
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Cryptocurrency has been a hot topic in 2018, and Google claims that “What is bitcoin?” was one of its top questions this year. A lot of people (and companies) jumped on the cryptocurrency train, including Razer. The company is now offering users store credit in exchange for cryptocurrency mining. But is this program too good to be true? Many argue that the Razer SoftMiner rewards program is misleading and exploitative. How does this rather confusing program work? Users are asked to download SoftMiner, a blockchain-based app that has been integrated into Razer’s software. The software is supposed to run silently in the background and draw upon a user’s idle GPU resources....
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