Hackers are levering Nvidia’s hashrate throttle
Nvidia Geforce RTX 3060. (Image: Nvidia)
In order to reduce the high demand a little, Nvidia had artificially throttled the mining hashrate possible with the Geforce RTX 3060 by half. Resourceful inventors have evidently bypassed this mechanism.
Even before the official sales start of the RTX 3060 at the end of February, resellers were offering the Nvidia graphics card at completely overpriced prices. But it wasn’t just scalpers that made it difficult for gamers to get hold of a new graphics card. Ethereum miners also need graphics cards to generate the cryptocurrency. Nvidia responded by artificially reducing the maximum possible mining hashrate of the RTX 3060 by half. So the card should be of no interest to crypto miners. However, resourceful hackers have now apparently canceled the throttling.
Since the release of version 1.8y3 on July 10, 2021, the mining tool miniZ be able to bypass the RTX 3060’s hash rate brake. A beta version published on July 21 is also said to have solved certain stability problems with Ether mining with the graphics card. According to the miniZ developers, the software should make hashrates of around 40 megahash per second possible. Due to the hashrate brake, however, it should only be possible to achieve 20 to 25 megahash per second with one of the RTX 3060s.
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Hashrate brake may have been canceled earlier by other miners
As early as March, screenshots published in the social networks showed that some miners might have deactivated the hashrate brake at this point in time. One of these screenshots seemed to prove, for example, that at least one miner had achieved a hashrate of a little more than 45 megahash per second with the RTX 3060. However, the screenshots could hardly be verified at the time.
In the long term, at least the Ethereum network should get away from power-hungry graphics cards. The network is currently using a so-called proof-of-work algorithm. For mining, complex mathematical tasks are solved, for which in turn powerful graphics cards are required. With the planned update to Ethereum 2.0, a proof-of-stake algorithm is to be used instead. It is not yet entirely clear when the time will come. Those who have had problems getting their desired graphics card due to the high demand could also benefit.
