Ether Miners, Last Wednesday (10), tweeted from an anonymous technology account, a screenshot of a panel with the following message: “Chinese‘ mod ’drug” to crack Nvidia hash limiter.
The tweet suggested that Chinese ether (ETH) miners were able to circumvent the restriction that Nvidia integrated into its RTX 3060 graphics cards (GPUs) used to mine ether.
The screenshot showed that the RTX 3060 GPUs were showing a hashing power of 45 MH / s, well above the supposed limit of 50% of the hashes rate, announced by Nvidia in February.
The information quickly spread, both to the gamer community and the crypto community, with headlines citing Twitter as a source, that Chinese miners “allegedly” circumvented Nvidia’s hash rate limiter on the Ethereum network.
The problem is that: it is not true.
None of the miners or operators of ether mining pools, who spoke to The Block, claimed to have seen a true solution that could “crack” the Nvidia GPU limiter to deliver hash rate performance above 40 MH / s .
It would have been surprising since, when Nvidia introduced its RTX 3060 in February, the company said it was presenting a safe way to reduce 50% of the GPU’s computing power if used in ether mining.
Kristy-Leigh Minehan, a crypto mining expert, former Core Scientific and former Genesis Mining, suggested that she would investigate the situation to try to do so.
“To overcome it, you would need an NVIDIA private key to be able to sign a common driver, the VBIOS implementation [and] the tool used to make internal VBIOS modifications to Nvidia, some with the same driver (on their development servers) ), so they would have to record all of that, ”she told The Block.
Basically: “the only way to get around this would be for an NV employee with a signed VBIOS and a new version of the drive 😂”, she added.
So what caused all the confusion?
It appears that the Twitter account that leaked the original image had not confirmed, until hours later, that the screenshot had been misinterpreted.
The same account published another tweet to clarify that the screenshot was not related to the performance of Ethereum’s hashing power, but related to Conflux, another blockchain proof-of-work (PoW) network, not subject to the rate limiter of Nvidia hashes.
The account tweeted another chart, showing how the RTX 3060 GPUs were actually showing a reduced hash rate of 25 MH / s.
