It'll be a good opportunity to see some nice hardware hacks, sure. But I'd guess serious miners don't really wanna deal with that shit and will just buy the miner-specific cards or use ASICs. This measure just raises the bar enough to make it a hassle.
Serious miners will go to great lengths to improve their efficiency by even a fraction of 1%. They will absolutely patch some drivers if it gets them better hashes/kwh (which it will or Nvidia wouldn't do this).
ethereum is asic-resistant, not asic-proof. It doesn't mean you can't make ASICs, just that ASICs are <10x as efficient as an equivalent-node GPU, vs millions of times more efficient for bitcoin/etc.
We’ll see a cottage industry of modders. Turning a $300 thing into a $600 thing should be a viable business.
Though I’ve seen some really sketchy mods before… can’t find it at the moment, but one involved taking a dremel to the chip to break an internal pad/link.
They previously did this with the 3060 cards, but accidently released beta drivers that unlocked the countermeasures [1]. I am sure people just start with using those drivers on the 3070/80 cards.
Probably not much of a cat-and-mouse game. Once they can bypass it once, all they have to do is not update. Unless Nvidia is prepared to release new hardware revisions every time.
No new hardware revision needed. Just a new on-card BIOS requiring a newer driver with a more fine-tuned mining detection. Should be trivial for manufacturers.
Hacks that re-enable mining likely won't be showing up on tpb anytime soon! A bypass will be worth quite a bit of money for large miners that can get hold of the cards.
