NVIDIA: "We’re limiting the hash rate of GeForce RTX 3060 GPUs so they’re less desirable to miners and launching NVIDIA CMP for professional mining."
@fribbledom GPU mining is still a thing? Hasn't everyone moved on to ASICs now?
@jlamothe There are chains that use ASIC-resistant hashing algorithms. Ethereum, for example, uses Ethash which was originally billed as needing a block of memory to complete hashes and only sees minimal performance gains when using ASICs or FPGAs. Bitcoin and its forks are all ASIC-able though.
In the early days there was the threat of "if you miners fab ASICs, we'll just fork the chain and make your ASICs worthless" but that seems to have died down. Now that Ethereum is moving towards proof of stake it's less attractive. However, miners are naturally long these assets and the underlying paper value has shot up so maybe they do have tons of capital to get some silicon fabbed. F2Pool for example is still trying them.
@jlamothe True that it still boils down to: is the asset being mined worth fabricating ASICs. Again in the case of Ethereum, part of the ASIC-resistance comes from having to load the chain's entire Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) into memory to perform the hashing. While GPUs are remaining above the current 4GB size, some of the ASICs are no longer functional as they have <4GB onboard. Similarly as smart-contracts can do any work via the EVM, ASICs have to be general processors vs BTC scrypt ASICs.