NVIDIA Is Not Giving Up on the ‘Anti-Mining’ Dream Yet

• NVIDIA has changed the 3060 chip with a new one that will keep the hash-limiter intact.
• People won’t be able to use the leaked beta driver with the new chips anymore.
• Whether or not this will work as expected, we will have to wait until next month to see.

NVIDIA will not give up on the effort to implement a system that would deter crypto-miners from buying graphics cards meant to reach gamers. The firm wants to segment the two markets and prevent any overlaps, and even if its first attempt failed spectacularly, they are planning to return with something far more robust and allegedly unhackable.

According to reports coming from HKEPC and citing Taiwan-based production units, NVIDIA is planning to replace the GPU chip used in the RTX 3060 with a newer iteration which will receive a new PCI Device ID. Thus, the older chip drivers won’t work with the new cards, which means that those planning to use the “unlocking” driver (470.05 Beta) that NVIDIA mistakenly leaked won’t be able to make it work with the new 3060 cards.

The hash limiter won’t be removable from the driver anymore because the driver and the hardware will follow a “secure handshake” process. If the limiter is missing, the driver will be considered invalid. It means that even if users succeed in stripping the driver from hash limiters, they won’t be able to make it work with the paired product.

As for the HDMI dongle trick, we don’t expect that one to continue to work as an unlocking trick either, although nobody has reported failure with it yet. It should be fairly easy for NVIDIA to deal with this inadequacy on the new cards.

Of course, crackers could still find a clever way to trick the hardware into believing that the limiter is still there when it isn’t - or to keep the limiter but deactivate it. We have no way of knowing, and it’s definitely not going to be easy, but people have historically been very good at cracking the “uncrackable.” Either way, we’ll get to see what happens by May, when the new cards are to be made available in the market.