Musk Says Telsa To Accept Bitcoin Again When Miners Use More Clean Energy

Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the company will return to accepting bitcoin as payment when the cryptocurrency’s miners use more clean, environmentally friendly energy. The crypto-enthusiast and environmentalist has seen his core passions collide with one another.

“When there’s confirmation of reasonable (~50%) clean energy usage by miners with positive future trend, Tesla will resume allowing Bitcoin transactions,” he said on Twitter. According to Reuters, bitcoin rallied over 9% after the post.

CNBC said the billionaire was responding to pointed remarks from Magda Wierzycka, the CEO of South African asset manager Sygnia, who accused him of manipulating the price of bitcoin. Previously, Tesla bought US$1.5 billion (~RM6.2 billion) worth of bitcoin and later said it would accept the digital currency as payment for cars.

That policy was abruptly reversed last month with Musk declaring that the push for cryptocurrency “cannot come at great cost to the environment.” To be fair to the billionaire, even then, he maintained that Tesla will accept bitcoin transactions again when miners transition to “more sustainable energy.”

Of course, that statement as well as his latest one raise more questions than answers. Given the tremendous power demands of bitcoin mining, is that transition to cleaner energy even possible? Wouldn’t that require national-level, government-driven efforts to move away from ‘dirty’ energy sources like coal? Why seemingly put the onus on miners and how long would that transition take?

Finally, the billionaire-dollar question: Can enthusiasm for bitcoin be sustained until then?

GPU Miners Bypass NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Hashrate Limiter With Cheap HDMI Dummy Plug

Back in February, NVIDIA made two announcements in relation to the renewed cryptomining craze. The first was the launch of its Cryptocurrency Mining Processor (CMP) GPU, made specifically for cryptomining. The second was that it was limiting the hashrate of Ethereum mining for the RTX 3060, a pledge that has already been thwarted by GPU miners.

Unfortunately for NVIDIA, its anti-mining algorithm for the RTX 3060 are still actively being rubbished by GPU miners, with their most workaround the GPU brand’s Ethereum mining limiter being an HDMI dummy plug that can easily be procured from online stores.

For the uninitiated, NVIDIA’s anti-mining algorithm is designed to nerf the hashrate for Ethereum mining for all RTX 3060 cards. However, and for reasons still unknown, the company later released a GeForce beta driver that disabled the limiter within the algorithm, albeit still with some restrictions in place, in the form of parameters.

First, the motherboard that holds the RTX 3060 must have a PCIe 3.0 x8 interface as a minimum, which is pretty much any motherboard within the last six to seven years. The second parameter requires a monitor to be connected RTX 3060 via the onboard HDMI or DisplayPort output.

Bypassing the first parameter is clearly simple enough, and as we mentioned earlier, it didn’t take long for the GPU miners to realise that, while the driver is able to detect when a monitor is connected via the ports, it is unable to differentiate the difference between a real monitor or the dummy plug. To add insult to injury, the plugs themselves are cheap and go for around US$6 (~RM24) per unit.

As shown by one user from Quasar Zone, the workaround enabled him to run a four-card RTX 3060 setup, with each card able to mine Ethereum at an average of 48MH/s, bringing the total hashrate to 192MH/s. In terms of profitability, that’s a monthly average of US$562 (~RM2318).

Miners Successfully Hack Through Mining Restrictions For NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

Back before the launch of the GeForce RTX 3060, NVIDIA announced its CMP, a GPU lineup specifically dedicated to mining crytocurrency. Additionally, it also announced that it would be limiting the hashrate of the RTX 3060, in hope that it would deter GPU miners from scalping or hoarding the GPU.

As the saying goes, life isn’t fair, and unsurprisingly, the so-called “mining restriction” that was put in place by NVIDIA has reportedly been broken by the very same miners. Japan-based tech site, PC Watch, confirmed that NVIDIA’s restrictions had already been “circumvented” via interaction with related parties.

The specific method isn’t mentioned by PC Watch, but the site states that bypassing the RTX 3060 restrictions does not require any modification to the card’s driver of BIOS, and a “little effort” is all it takes to get it to mine.

It also appears that the hack isn’t restricted to just one type of mining software. A group of developers by the name of Phoenix Miners, posted a reply on GitHub that it was working on a big update revolving around NVIDIA kernels. Another report points at a particular NVIDIA WSL driver – namely, a 470.05 Beta driver – that will, in fact, remove NVIDIA’s restrictions for Ethereum mining on the RTX 3060. However, it should be noted that this claim still remains unconfirmed.

As for the RTX 3060’s mining performance with the restrictions lifted, there are some videos of the card achieving hashrates beyond 40MH/s while mining for Ethereum and is even capable of sustaining those rates, even after nearly an hour of use.

NVIDIA Will Be Limiting GeForce RTX 3060 Hash Rate To Deter Cryptocurrency Miners

Alongside the announcement of NVIDIA Cryptocurrency Minis Processor (CMP), the GPU company has also revealed that they will be limiting the cryptocurrency mining capability of their upcoming graphics card, the GeForce RTX 3060.

Scheduled to launch on 25 February, the RTX 3060 will be the most affordable option in the RTX 30 Series family which means that it is likely to have high demand from consumers. This also means that the card would be more accessible for cryptocurrency miners to buy in bulk as well, which could affect the card’s availability to its intended users: gamers.

In its effort to stop that from happening, the drivers for RTX 3060 have been designed to limit the card’s capability to mine Ethereum cryptocurrency. Specifically, NVIDIA claimed that the implementation will cut the hash rate to around 50 per cent which hopefully will be deterrent enough to miners out there and turn them over to NVIDIA CMP cards instead.

While that sounds like an interesting plan, we not sure if it will really address the GPU shortage that the market is facing right now though. Additionally, some miners already looking at gaming laptops to get their job done anyway.

Chinese Miners Now Grabbing NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series Laptops To Mine Ethereum

The recent rally and current value of both Bitcoin and Ethereum have clearly sparked renewed interest within the crypto mining community, as evidenced by one miner who unashamedly showed off his 100-card NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 mining rig. Now, in what can only be described as an act of desperation, Chinese GPU miners are turning their attention towards gaming laptops powered by NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs.

News of the RTX 30 series laptops being bulk bought was first reported on the Chinese social media platform, Weibo, with one BiliBili user by the name of “Fish Pond F2pool” showing just how lucrative mining Ethereum currently is with an Ampere-based GPU. It’s all in Chinese, obviously, but as a side note, she makes it clear in the video that she made the video purely out of fun and to give an example.

Getting back to the main point, the content creator shows a laptop equipped with an RTX 3060 set to mine Ethereum. The kicker here is that she’s plugged her laptop into a wall socket at a local Starbucks, and she’s sipping a cup of coffee while at it. For a period of two hours, the laptop’s RTX 3060 was able to mine 0.00053 ETH, which at current market rate, is around RM3.50. On a related note, that’s also supposedly how much her coffee cost.

Cryptomining with graphics cards has long been a popular method employed by miners. For the uninitiated, mining cryptocurrency requires a mining rig to complete a series of complex calculations or puzzles, known as “blocks”. How much a miner is paid depends on how fast his system can complete the puzzle. Simply put, the more cards in a mining rig, the more coins they get, as well as puzzles.

In contrast to trading, GPU mining doesn’t require any money to be put down. Well, aside from the initial cost of purchasing the graphics card needed for the task. Further, GPU miners, at this current moment, put up less resistance in mining Ethereum than an ASIC miner.

Nevertheless, the news of Chinese miners hoarding RTX 30 series gaming laptops en masse is not a good sign and only adds to ongoing GPU shortage. As it stands, both NVIDIA and its rival, AMD, have hinted at the graphics card drought stretching well into the year, and the worse part is that there is no end in sight.