Cryptocurrencies Add Nothing Useful To Society, Says Nvidia (theguardian.com) 212
The US chip-maker Nvidia has said cryptocurrencies do not "bring anything useful for society" despite the company's powerful processors selling in huge quantities to the sector. From a report: Michael Kagan, its chief technology officer, said other uses of processing power such as the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT were more worthwhile than mining crypto. Nvidia never embraced the crypto community with open arms. In 2021, the company even released software that artificially constrained the ability to use its graphics cards from being used to mine the popular Ethereum cryptocurrency, in an effort to ensure supply went to its preferred customers instead, who include AI researchers and gamers. Kagan said the decision was justified because of the limited value of using processing power to mine cryptocurrencies.
The first version ChatGPT was trained on a supercomputer made up of about 10,000 Nvidia graphics cards. "All this crypto stuff, it needed parallel processing, and [Nvidia] is the best, so people just programmed it to use for this purpose. They bought a lot of stuff, and then eventually it collapsed, because it doesn't bring anything useful for society. AI does," Kagan told the Guardian. "With ChatGPT, everybody can now create his own machine, his own programme: you just tell it what to do, and it will. And if it doesn't work the way you want it to, you tell it 'I want something different.'" Crypto, by contrast, was more like high-frequency trading, an industry that had led to a lot of business for Mellanox, the company Kagan founded before it was acquired by Nvidia. "We were heavily involved in also trading: people on Wall Street were buying our stuff to save a few nanoseconds on the wire, the banks were doing crazy things like pulling the fibres under the Hudson taut to make them a little bit shorter, to save a few nanoseconds between their datacentre and the stock exchange," he said. "I never believed that [crypto] is something that will do something good for humanity. You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell them stuff. But you don't redirect the company to support whatever it is."
The first version ChatGPT was trained on a supercomputer made up of about 10,000 Nvidia graphics cards. "All this crypto stuff, it needed parallel processing, and [Nvidia] is the best, so people just programmed it to use for this purpose. They bought a lot of stuff, and then eventually it collapsed, because it doesn't bring anything useful for society. AI does," Kagan told the Guardian. "With ChatGPT, everybody can now create his own machine, his own programme: you just tell it what to do, and it will. And if it doesn't work the way you want it to, you tell it 'I want something different.'" Crypto, by contrast, was more like high-frequency trading, an industry that had led to a lot of business for Mellanox, the company Kagan founded before it was acquired by Nvidia. "We were heavily involved in also trading: people on Wall Street were buying our stuff to save a few nanoseconds on the wire, the banks were doing crazy things like pulling the fibres under the Hudson taut to make them a little bit shorter, to save a few nanoseconds between their datacentre and the stock exchange," he said. "I never believed that [crypto] is something that will do something good for humanity. You know, people do crazy things, but they buy your stuff, you sell them stuff. But you don't redirect the company to support whatever it is."
When one of the biggest profiteers of crypto scams (Score:5, Insightful)
now openly spits on their customers, you know you really, really shouldn't touch cryptocurrencies with a 10-ft pole.
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What actually seems to have happened is that they artificially maintained GPU mined ethereum-era pricing and just trickled in new top end, even more expensive GPUs, while leaving the mass mid end market to the previous gen unsold GPUs.
So we now see that 3080 series is almost sold out, 3070 is starting to get sold out, and 3060 is still massively in stock. At the same time 4080 is mass sold, 4070 Ti is coming in hard at prices higher than 3080, and nothing below that is present in 40x0 series.
Essentially nvi
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I'm fairly certain ML will handily catch a lot of that excess. A *lot* of tech and tech-adjacent firms are now eyeing off machine learning after the rather astonishing GPT models demonstrated just how far these things have come (Ie at work we're starting to mess with ML in our research on trying to improve soil monitoring from limited data collection, and the results have been almost shockingly good) but these things usually need fairly hectic GPU setups to run.
And I suspect thats the real core of this. Nvi
Re:When one of the biggest profiteers of crypto sc (Score:5, Informative)
NVidia made a small fortune selling GPU's to crypto miners during the crypto booms of 2017 and 2021, though, often at the expense for their other customers.
Now that Ethereum mining is Proof Of Stake and Bitcoin hasn't been profitable to mine with a GPU for almost a decade now, Nvidia needs to latch onto the latest IT fad (AI) in order to keep their profits up.
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That is already done. Nvidia is one of the main providers of neural network AI compute cards.
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No, it was merely trying to make sure that demand would stay maximized. This was very visible in cards like 3060, where mobile variant that was the actual gamer card came with 6GB of ram and a lot of GPU cores, while the desktop variant that was basically "straight to miners" card had 12GB of ram so you could run two instances of ethereum mining (you needed about 5GB of ram per instance) but had less GPU cores than the mobile variant.
This is because GPU mined ethereum was capped by memory speed and size, an
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Hey... if I was Nvidia, I'd be pissed off at crypto miners right now as well. The miners are all unloading their 3080's and 3090's at fire sale prices on the used market, making it more difficult to sell new 4070 and 4080 cards.
Of course, it's their own damn fault for letting their OEM partners sell them directly to the big mining operations by the truckload while the retail channels were all out of stock, but that little factoid is not going to help them defend missing their Q1 and Q2 2023 profit forecasts
We made our money already... (Score:5, Insightful)
This would have been "brave" to say a few years ago when they were selling GPU's to miners hand over fist and the market was absolutely fubared because of it, now this feels like jumping on the bandwagon as public sentiment has shifted.
It is now safe to insult what is a declining customer base as supply has caught up at long last, nothing about crypto is new or changed since it began, it was useless then and is useless now (I will caveat by saying useless for 99% of society)
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I understand what you mean but they kind of did and always tried to hamper miner efforts to buy up cards with limited supply.
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The LHR option was pretty widely regarded as useless and they never seemed (as far as I could tell or remember) made any serious enforement in the supply chain nor did I hear a statement as bold as this one so it rings a little hollow, at least that's my opinion.
NVIDIA’s GPU Hash Rate Limiter Deemed Pointless By Cryptocurrency Miners [hothardware.com]
Re: We made our money already... (Score:2)
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They did very bravely "say it" back in the heydays of crypto, they purposefully nerfed using their cards for mining with changes to the drivers. They have not been very subtle all along with their disdain for crypto mining. Nvidia has been very clear since the beginning of the crypto craze to show that miners were the lowest priority customer base for them.
Re:We made our money already... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes they did do that but that was widely regarded as useless from both sides (crypto customers and skeptics alike) came way too late into the shortage and NVIDIA while not in total control of their supply chain could have done a lot more.
It rings a bit hollow and strictly curosory PR damage control when for maybe 2 years gamers either couldn't ahold of cards or had to pay wildly inflated prices meanwhile the crypto boom saw their profits soar wildly above previous years. I bet they felt that was "useful".
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What exactly would you have wanted them to do? They seem to have done as much as they could to discourage miners, so how exactly could they have discouraged them then, if nerfing the driver for mining-specific things wasn't "brave" enough? What is this "a lot more" they could have done?
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This is like Bill Gates shitting on the ineffectiveness of the "vaccine" IMMEADIATELY AFTER selling this stake at a 10x gain.
But the fools keep eating it up. This is just another example.
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Where have you been? Nvidia has been anti-crypto for a long time.
Re:We made our money already... (Score:4, Informative)
NVIDIA Cmp Hx - Dedicated GPU for Professional Mining
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/c... [nvidia.com]
Re: We made our money already... (Score:2)
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Because PR is kinda the only reason really to make this statement in an officially public capacity.
Philosophically I also feel corporations should have something more to their direction and purpose than "make money" and the idea that shareholder-returns-above-all-else has been a net negative to society as a whole.
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It was safe to insult them before, what were they going to do, switch to AMD? Snicker.
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I guess that's a cynical but probably accurate way to view it.
Not that it matters to them but I switched to AMD because of that fiasco but I am but one customer.
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I guess that's a cynical but probably accurate way to view it.
Finally, I know what I want on my tombstone.
Next contestant... (Score:5, Funny)
Crypto is wonderfully useful (Score:5, Funny)
I have money to launder. I have drugs, guns, and child porn to buy. I have kidnappings and extortions to be paid for. I have totalitarian regimes to support.
Re: Crypto is wonderfully useful (Score:2)
I wanted to give crypto a try for the 'family business'. In the end I stuck with HSBC. They're very discrete, and I got a free pen.
They're just upset because they're not needed (Score:3, Interesting)
Their GPUs are closer to irrelevant than must-have items for most crypto today. None of the Proof of Stake coins that I know of need them, and their energy requirements are right in line with green energy requirements. AFAIK, the only Proof of Work coin in the top 10 is Bitcoin.
So in a sense, he's right. They should have been building a business plan that absolutely did not depend on Proof of Work crypto because the writing was on the wall by 2020 once people saw that Ripple, Cardano, XLM, etc. could execute transfers even cheaper than ACH transfers.
He's also wrong about it being like high frequency trading. High frequency traders will hate tokenized securities because they'll either have to spend more network gas fees to speed up transactions or slow down their trading drastically. If anything, crypto tokenizing securities markets will be a great move for retail and institutional value investors because it'll break a lot of day traders' and scalpers' strategies.
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...not needed for pointless Proof Of Work - and they can get back to being useful for really useful applications
and people can actually but their cards, rather than being on backorder constantly
Now that they extrated all value from the fad (Score:2)
Nvidia "suddenly" realize that cryptocurrencies add nothing of value...
The fact that Cryptomining on GPUs is at an all time low, and will remain so for the foreseable future, has nothing to do with this statement, pinky swear!
Sure, it adds something... (Score:2)
... to nVidia's bottom line, period. And they're decrying it now because unlike the suckers who've bought into crypto, they see the writing on the wall, that crypto's collapsing like the fraud it is, as a lot of us said all along.
If so, (Score:2)
Else this is marketing that sadly mostly will believe.
Opinion (Score:2)
We can fix that headline for you. How about "Cryptocurrencies Add Nothing Useful To Society" says company that has never been denied access to financial services or paid extortionate rates with Western Union et al. to send money internationally.
here's something useful they do (Score:2, Funny)
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Don't need crypto to accomplish this. He didn't say they have zero uses, but "useful for society". This is not a "useful for society" use, because it can be done without crypto and already happens. And sending value anywhere around the world using crypto is almost always for something illegal...which is naturally not useful for society.
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Fractions of a cent? Bitcoin fees are usually much higher than that. Gas fees on Ethereum are sometimes into three digits. Then you have to take into account fees for converting from fiat and back again.
There is also no such thing as an 'instant' crypto transfer. If it takes a couple of minutes you're lucky. A congested network means it could take hours as Bitcoin is, and forever will be, limited to 7 transactions a second.
And if you get hacked at any time the money is gone. No central authority able to hel
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Replace The Fed (Score:2)
I'm convinced - we should put Nvidia in charge of the US Banking industry instead of the Federal Reserve since they have so much understanding of complex economic topics that they're willing to say such things in public.
The hilarious thing is AI's are using blockchains for their economic communications layer.
Crypto is actually a problem for nVidia (Score:3)
It may at first look like they should love the cryptobros. They buy their cards, at virtually any price it seems. Great for business, ain't it? Well... erh.... no. It's not. Not in the long term. Let's take a closer look at what's happening.
nVidia has the same problem RasPi is facing: There are others that could potentially muscle into their market. Sure, right now they are the top dog. Everyone wants to make their stuff to cater to their strong suits. Everyone wants to make games that run perfect on nVidia cards, just like everyone wants to create projects that run on RasPi. That is, until the users notice that they can't get their hands on nVidia cards, or RasPis for that matter. You could either buy a nVidia card for your new gaming PC, or you could buy an AMD that is about as fast for half the price. Sure, the games ain't optimized for it, but we're talking saving a lot of money and it ain't THAT much worse, is it?
This in turn will make game makers reconsider. If suddenly the majority of their target audience is running AMD, why optimize for nVidia? Instead, take into account the features AMD has to offer and optimize your games for those cards instead.
Because nVidia saw the signs on the wall. The first bars of the swan song for crypto are being heard, the fat lady has already heavily inhaled. What remains after is the gaming crowd as a target audience. And if the majority of them is on AMD, nVidia has to play the catch-up game that they currently made AMD play.
money is all a fallacy (Score:2)
Crypto is not real.
Money is not real.
They are both just markers representing the exchange of goods and services.
They have both been undermined by opportunism and usury.
They both have created whole industries supporting fallacies.
nVidia cards are overpriced, but they never mined (Score:2)
They could have made billions by diverting their product to a company owned Texas sized crypto mining farm, but they didn't. And IIRC they made a stab at thwarting scalpers, and they made a stab at altering the BIOS of their cards to make them less attractive to miners, and thus more available to their historic customer base. Also afaik they and AMD sold their chips and reference cards at regular prices, and any surge in prices due to crypto miners competing for supply was at the retail level. nVidia and AM
bs (Score:2)
think bigger (Score:2)
These innovations, if widely adopted, could lead to a more efficient, secure, and sustainable society, which may be a step towards the development of a Kardashev civilization. Bitcoin's potential to incre
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Bitcoin != blockchain.
Bitcoin is too centralized in too few individuals. Better off restarting from scratch for any valid uses of blockchain if any are found.
No fucking shit? (Score:2)
Translation (Score:2)
Translation: major proof of work coins can no longer be mined on our hardware so cryptocurrencies have become useless to us.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Harm?
- wasting energy - climate damage
- scamming people out of their savings
- damaging the banking system
- undermining government
Other than that... no problems.
Re: Seriously? (Score:5, Interesting)
funding terrorism
money laundering
black market sales
payment for criminal acts
payment for child abuse material
payment for human trafficking
payment for illegal weapons
payment for illegal drugs
payment for hacking tools used to victimize the public
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Hasn't cash been used for all of these items as well? What before crypto was used for illegal payments?
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How can we allow this $USD criminal tool of empowerment to stil exist?
Re: Seriously? (Score:4)
This was also policed. Money laundering is a major crime, whether it's by USD or BTC. BTC being harder to track and police is what led to its enthusiastic adoption by criminal enterprises. *Theoretically*, Bitcoin by itself is neutral; but in practice it's been coopted for evil purposes (drugs, human trafficking, money laundering, hiding oligarch's money, funding wars, etc).
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Since when have drugs been evil?!
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Since Republicans decided it was a good way to oppress Black people and "hippies"/ This is according to Richard Nixon, the initiator of the "War On Drugs".
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Illegal drugs. Heroin, fentanyl, other opiates, meth, etc. Causing people to die.
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Weed is illegal in some places. Alcohol is legal and causes infinitely more deaths. People should be allowed to put whatever they want into their body if they're not harming anyone else.
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Weed is legal many places, but still has a thriving criminal market. That's the danger there, not that some drugs are harming you but the drug sellers and infrastructure operating behind the scenes, which is where the BTC comes into play.
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Sure and then they DUI into a minivan full of kids.
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Yes. But cryptocurrencies make it easier. They are better enablers of crime than cash, without the stability necessary to be useful in all the good ways that cash is useful.
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Here's the thing, people get de-banked and cut off from payment systems, not for breaking the law but for being controversial. Cryptocurrency is a way around that.
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Cryptocurrencies provide a bad way around that that brings with it a whole lot of crime-enabling including working around de-banking that is part of the action of legitimate law enforcement.
So its a drop of good bought at the price of a bucket of bad.
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Everybody wants to ban what they can't control.
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He also was a fan of being armed(you know the whole sell your cloak if you don't have a sword). Because he gets us.
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Arguably Jesus did not teach pacifism. The "turning the other cheek" was in response to insult (delivered as inconsequential injury), not in response to credible threats against life and limb. However, what Jesus may or may not have meant is inconsequential, because any given church will push its forgone conclusion and simply reference the scriptures to justify that conclusion.
That's how all religious doctrines work. They don't come from religious scriptures, they come from religious institutions that si
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No. Anarchy is far worse than an imperfect government. Bad governments should be dealt with via democratic processes and public accountability, not through criminal enablement.
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It's kinda hard to get cash out of the country. There's a reason huge denominations (like 500 Euros) are being pulled from circulation, they serve no purpose other than getting a lot of money out of the country easily.
Do you have a faint idea what volume a million USD is? Even in 100s? Stacking a million in 100s would be over a meter tall.(over 3.5 feet for you imperialists).
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Care to inform me what transaction you'd think needs to be so private that the IRS better not know about it?
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No, Putin's little puppy, it's not "uncounted".
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Because their Lord and Savior, Putin, claims that parts of Ukraine is really Russian, and that the parts of Ukraine that are not Russian are instead are full of Nazis raised back to life as a zombie horde eager to eat Russian brains.
Putin pays the trolls, literally; see the Internet Research Agency for example, probably he's got other paid outlets for this.
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Bullshit. The colored revolutions came because those countries were run by corrupt puppets of Putin. Sure, the west cheered for this, because cheering for the rights of the people seems like a natural thing, and only a moron cheers for the dictators.
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Name me one country where USA did not start a war or revolution which did not sink up to its knees in blood and ended up better than it was?
The list of countries where the U.S. hasn't started a war or revolution is pretty big. You sure you want to argue that almost the entire world is up to its knees in blood?
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genetically I am more Ukrainian than anything else.(albeit i don't call myself this way).
You're actually more African than anything else.
(we all are)
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We all know how well an unregulated banking system works.
SVB owners made out like bandits while taxpayers are stuck with the bill.
The crash of 2008 bailed out the banks and cost taxpayers billions and thousands of people lost their homes.
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The repeal under Clinton of the Glass-Steagall act, allowed commercial and investments banks to be one entity. The great depression was widely considered to be a result of speculative recklessness. The 2008 arm-a meltdown was allowed to happen where otherwise it wouldn't have been through this repeal. It wasn't regulated like it had been previously.
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Repeal of Glass-Steagall definitely led to the crash of 2008.
After the 2008 meltdown, more regulation was introduced (Dodd) until it was repealed by Trump... Then, of course, we started having problems again.
There should be a lesson here but the banks keep bribing politicians to believe otherwise.
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Oh... I guess you are referring to the complete solid, unscam FTX. Or maybe one of the other crypto exchange frauds, hacks, "founder disappeared with all the money" scams where people have lost hundreds of millions of dollars. Or maybe one of the hundreds of crypto "coins" in which the Ponzi scheme early investors make out like bandits and everyone else loses their money.
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Here are a few analyses of Bitcoin from (not) drooling morons: It's totally not a Ponzi scheme.
https://www.ft.com/content/83a... [ft.com]
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/2... [cnbc.com]
https://www.forbes.com/sites/b... [forbes.com]
https://www.inc.com/linkedin/v... [inc.com]
https://thehill.com/opinion/fi... [thehill.com]
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- wasting energy - climate damage
Just causing brownouts and blackouts and a ton of noise is already bad enough.
Re: Seriously? (Score:2)
Define "undermine".
If that includes knowing where your subjects are and what they are spending money on at all times, then yes, it undermines government.
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Not sure what you're rambling on about here. Certainly the World Bank doesn't care if/when/how you send $5 to Africa.
I've sent money to Africa to fund green energy projects (via banks, credit cards, etc.) and never had any unreasonable charges.
Crypto Already Harming NVidia (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why they view crypto as a problem - it is getting in the way of them developing their long-term, stable markets of gamers and machine learning which is where their long-term future lies. So, in some ways, crypto is already harming them and when the inevitable crash comes it will harm a lot of others who have invested in it too.
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Re:Crypto Already Harming NVidia (Score:5, Insightful)
False. https://www.engadget.com/nvidi... [engadget.com]
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Nvidia only implemented LHR in the lower tier cards. The 3090 was left alone.
Re:Crypto Already Harming NVidia (Score:4, Interesting)
3090 wasn't cost per hash competitive with a 3060. In other words you could purchase multiple 3060s instead of a 3090.
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This. If it were not useful to someone, it wouldn't be used by anyone.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5)
They already made their money on it, so now they can badmouth it as if they regret all those piles of cash that were flowing in just a couple of years ago.
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Finite resource, the price of these monster new cards that are needed for AI would drop if the crypto people would ease up on the demand.
The cryptococks have already backed off on GPU purchases, there is now Antminer E9 designed for Ethash-based cryptocurrencies and Eth itself went to PoS.
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The USD is not backed by anything physical.
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Sure it is.
Guns. A lot of guns. Big guns. Huge guns. Very physically real guns.
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Which things are going which way?
What is your proposal for a new reserve currency?
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The day after we grow bored or run out of ammo for them, the Ukrainians will be overrun.
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