Nvidia’s never-ending saga of drama between its gamer customers and cryptocurrency miner clients continues thanks to complications brought on by the GPU giant itself. 

It’s no secret that cryptocurrency mining profitability is soaring across the board. And with higher revenues comes increased demand for mining capacity. GPU-based mining in particular has seen acute growth much to the dismay of gamers who want GPUs for other reasons, namely gaming. 

But in an effort to mollify gamers while not alienating its miner clientele, Nvidia recently revealed a brand new product tailor made for crypto miners. 

Concurrent with the product launch, Nvidia also said it would nerf its RTX 3060’s ability to efficiently mine cryptocurrencies with hopes that miners would be dissuaded from buying its GPUs en masse. 

Nvidia’s CEO said she expects at least $50 million in revenue from the new miner-focused product during its first quarter of sales. 

So, miners get their own special product and gamers don’t have to fight so hard to buy GPUs. Sounds great, right? 

Not quite. Shortly after Nvidia’s announcements, reports circulated that miners had circumvented Nvidia’s hashrate limiting features and could still use its GPUs for mining. Much to the chagrin of Nvidia and the disappointment of gamers, it seemed as though miners had outsmarted the GPU giant. Oops! 

But were the reports true? After a bit of investigative work, The Block’s Wolfie Zhao said no. None of the Ethereum mining pools he spoke to corroborated reports that miners had circumvented Nvidia’s mining limitation features. 

One would think Nvidia sighed in relief. But what actually happened is even worse. Miners didn’t outsmart Nvidia. The GPU manufacturer itself accidentally included code that removed the hashrate limiter. Nothing had changed, so far as miners were concerned.  

In a statement to The Verge, an Nvidia spokesperson said, “A developer driver inadvertently included code used for internal development which removes the hash rate limiter on RTX 3060 in some configurations.” 

So, no one had hacked anything. Nvidia accidentally let miners use its GPUs as they always had. The company said the driver has since been removed. Maybe this time crypto miners really won’t be able to use GPUs for efficient mining.

• Bitcoin price drops to $53,000 the recovers.

  • It’s been a choppy week for bitcoin. After failing to stay above $60,000 multiple times, the leading cryptocurrency fell to $53,000 early Tuesday morning. Since then it has rebounded a bit to above $55,000, but still has lots of ground to reclaim before setting new all-time highs. 

• Hut 8 joins Foundry’s institutional mining pool.

  • Toronto-based public mining company Hut 8 has joined Foundry’s mining pool with over 14,000 ASICs and another 5,000 planned to deploy by August. Hut 8’s CEO Jamie Leverton said “having a formidable bitcoin mining pool” is very important to her. 

• BTC Top’s CEO says bitcoin could top out at $300,000 this cycle.

  • Bitcoin could reach between $150,000 to $300,000 before the end of its current bull run, according to a bullish prediction made by Jiang Zhuoer, CEO of mining pool BTC Top.  Zhuoer’s pool is currently ranked the eight largest globally, per data from BTC.com.

• Bitcoin mining difficulty jumps 2%. 

  • On Friday, bitcoin’s mining difficulty passed 21.87 trillion, a nearly 2% increase. Already the next adjustment is expected to show an even larger upward increase, with a 3.5% jump estimated at last check. 

• Ethereum mining pools are testing strategies to preserve profits. 

  • Ethereum miners are testing software strategies designed to preserve as much profit as possible ahead of the revenue-cutting EIP 1559. Australia-based pool Ethermine is the first majority pool to test a Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) strategy. MEV profits brought miners $1.7 million in a single 24-hour period in mid March. 

• Blockcap and The9 bought $150 million worth of ASICs from Bitmain.

  • North American mining company Blockcap and Nasdaq-listed Chinese gaming company The9 have bought a combined 36,000 bitcoin mining machines from Bitmain worth over $150 million. The9 bought 24,000 ASICs and Blockcap bought 12,000, signalling the continued demand for more direct mining exposure by all sorts of institutions.

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