NVIDIA says cryptocurrencies add nothing to the society

NVIDIA sees cryptocurrencies as useless to the society

NVIDIA GPUs used for cryptomining, Source: NC

Micheal Kagan, NVIDIA Chief Technology Officer said that cryptocurrencies do not bring anything useful to the society, reports The Guardian. There is a better use for all that processing power, such as artificial intelligence, as the company is now focusing its data-center business on LLM (Large Language Model) AI tech, he adds.

In 2021, NVIDIA made its first attempt to stop the cryptocurrency boom impacting the RTX 30 GPU series. A new variant of RTX 3060 GPU was released featuring “Lite Hash Rate” technology which was said to reduce the mining efficiency. This technology was later added to the rest of the RTX 30 GPU series with some exceptions. However, just a couple of months later, cryptomining software developers were partially able to overcome the limitations of the LHR algorithm, and slowly unlocking full mining performance a year later.

NVIDIA GPUs used for cryptomining

In 2022, NVIDIA was forced to pay 5.5 million dollars as part of the settlement with the SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) because they did not inform the investors on how mining impacts the GPU demand. Furthermore, according to the SEC filing, NVIDIA was aware of cryptocurrency mining driving part of their business and even claims that NVIDIA senior management wanted to go after the crypto mining market, as reported by CNBC.

The last cryptoboom had a massive impact on the GPU market. With GPU prices skyrocketing (and unfortunately remaining) at unimaginable levels. It may take months if not years before GPUs return to normal prices, if that is going to happen at all.