Following recent crypto-currency news, the popular currency known as Ethereum has been driving up GPU prices and demolishing availability, has been hacked. An estimated 153,000 "Ether" has been stolen, with estimates at a value of 32.6 million US dollars.

"The initWallet function should have been marked internal, but was instead not marked. Unmarked functions default to public in Solidity, so anyone can call that function and reinitialize the wallet to be under their control"

Will this be the down-fall of Ethereum? Will we see a sudden surge of cheap, high end GPU's on the markets? One can only hope!

Read more about the wallet hack here.

 

[Armadillo]

Leaving aside that such a move would probably have them under fire by various regulatory bodies how would you propose doing that?

If it could be, I don't see why disabling a feature in drivers would cause any problems legally. It's not like locking off stuff via drivers hasn't been done before.

Nvidia locked you off from using a 2nd card as dedicated PhysX card if your primary card was AMD. Nothing stopping it working except artificial driver limitation (there was hacked drivers to go around it at one point).

Not sure why locking off mining would be different and cause them problems.

They might make a version that is less useful for games but can still do mining style calculations, and possibly some calculations others might want, but that is a different matter.

Sapphire already did it.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/sapp...sung-pci-express-graphics-card-gx-380-sp.html

470 with video out stripped off. Don't think it had the desired effect as there's no resale value on such a card when the bubble pops.


On gpu prices in general though, I wouldn't expect instant drops soon as mining is done anyway. Not just mining pushing them up, memory shortages are as well. Anything using memory has gone up as well. SSD prices and ram are also massivly inflated at the moment. Mining is not helping, but it's not the sole cause of high gpu prices.

 

[FAST6191]

You could possibly make a stability argument for the physx stuff, though I shall have to read more into that. The only driver related fun I had previously seen was for the CAD focused graphics cards and the regular ones where the former had special (usually slower and stability focused) drivers for essentially the same hardware.

It was more that it gets a bit tricky if you start restricting things for an otherwise open device. See also Sony getting a slap when they removed Linux from the PS3
http://www.playstationlifestyle.net...tion-lawsuit-regarding-os-reached-settlement/
Now I agree that depending upon the timing of actions and how they set about selling it, possibly also the nature of drivers (I am a bit behind the times but I assume they went the same way as Intel microcode in their CPUs/almost FPGA programming style setups) that the PS3 thing above may be poor comparison but that would be where I come from for now.

 

[gnmmarechal]

If it could be, I don't see why disabling a feature in drivers would cause any problems legally. It's not like locking off stuff via drivers hasn't been done before.

Nvidia locked you off from using a 2nd card as dedicated PhysX card if your primary card was AMD. Nothing stopping it working except artificial driver limitation (there was hacked drivers to go around it at one point).

Not sure why locking off mining would be different and cause them problems.



Sapphire already did it.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/sapp...sung-pci-express-graphics-card-gx-380-sp.html

470 with video out stripped off. Don't think it had the desired effect as there's no resale value on such a card when the bubble pops.


On gpu prices in general though, I wouldn't expect instant drops soon as mining is done anyway. Not just mining pushing them up, memory shortages are as well. Anything using memory has gone up as well. SSD prices and ram are also massivly inflated at the moment. Mining is not helping, but it's not the sole cause of high gpu prices.

I wouldn't buy any such card unless they were A LOT cheaper than their regular ones.

 

[Yil]

I wouldn't buy any such card unless they were A LOT cheaper than their regular ones.

Funny cause Nvidia said they are going to push both gtx 1060 and gtx 1080 (with GDDR5 which has lower latency) with mining optimized driver. They are hardly cheaper if not more expansive and a non-renewable warranty of 90 days.

 

[gnmmarechal]

Funny cause Nvidia said they are going to push both gtx 1060 and gtx 1080 (with GDDR5 which has lower latency) with mining optimized driver. They are hardly cheaper if not more expansive and a non-renewable warranty of 90 days.

If they're more expensive, I doubt they'll have much success

Sent from my cave of despair where I don't stalk Seriel

 

[gnmmarechal]

According to one I know, the only affected people were the stupid people who hadn't updated their client since January, and were still online.

 

[Pacheko17]

This sucks for a lot of people, some dudes are losing a shit ton of money, but all the kids care about is MUH GPUZ!!

 

[Yil]

This sucks for a lot of people, some dudes are losing a shit ton of money, but all the kids care about is MUH GPUZ!!

It's not a proper business practice and other people are stripped the chance to get a gpu.

 

[Mikemk]

It's not a proper business practice and other people are stripped the chance to get a gpu.

Making money is the only proper business practice, and supply/demand changes are logical effects.

 

[Yil]

Making money is the only proper business practice, and supply/demand changes are logical effects.

Still, I can get pissed about it and wish them bad luck.
And how is something that fluctuate this fast without any other purpose a proper practice? Do they make stuff or offer service that other people can use? Bitcoins have jumped over 1 million times.

 

[Futurdreamz]

Making money is the only proper business practice, and supply/demand changes are logical effects.

Accumulating goodwill can be vital to making money in the long term. And supply/demand doesn't really work once configuration complacency sets in. Why do you think so many people still use Yahoo?

 

[Deleted User]

So hopefully the 1060 6gb will go back down to 250$ on amazon?

 

[FAST6191]

Still, I can get pissed about it and wish them bad luck.
And how is something that fluctuate this fast without any other purpose a proper practice? Do they make stuff or offer service that other people can use? Bitcoins have jumped over 1 million times.

You can do as you please but I can not see how wishing someone ill will for doing no real harm is cool.
If facilitating transactions was not enough then again this is a type of currency which does so called smart contracts and that is a service any way you slice it

 

[Yil]

So hopefully the 1060 6gb will go back down to 250$ on amazon?

I should have grabbed Nitro+ rx 580 for 350 CAD (including tax) when I can.
Those will be the ones that underwent several month of mining abuse.

 

[TotalInsanity4]

You could possibly make a stability argument for the physx stuff, though I shall have to read more into that. The only driver related fun I had previously seen was for the CAD focused graphics cards and the regular ones where the former had special (usually slower and stability focused) drivers for essentially the same hardware.

If we want to get technical one could make the same argument for locking a card out of mining

 

[Yil]

If we want to get technical one could make the same argument for locking a card out of mining

So is it more likely to target established executable, codes (professional mining facilities should be running their own os, and Nvidia might not even have a driver for it so blocking is impossible), or protocals?

 

[brickmii82]

Even if drivers were locked, they'd still be used for mining. People would just create their own. They did it with firmware. Why would drivers be different? We hack the shit out of electronics here for gaming. People will go further if it involves money.

 

[Deleted-355425]

I have a pair of 1050Tis running Einstein@Home, they are awesome cards.

As far as crypto crap and fake money, I'll hang onto the real stuff.

chocolate money?

 

[Yil]

Even if drivers were locked, they'd still be used for mining. People would just create their own. They did it with firmware. Why would drivers be different? We hack the shit out of electronics here for gaming. People will go further if it involves money.

Not every miner has that capacity, even installing a custom firmware can be hard let alone writing them.

 

[Pacheko17]

It's not a proper business practice and other people are stripped the chance to get a gpu.

It is a proper business practice.
Otherwise, a friend of mine wouldn't be where he is today.
He started pretty early but he still profits from it.