Nvidia accidentally unlocked the RTX 3060 Ethereum mining limiter, a major mistake?

Yesterday, many people in the mining circle tweeted that the Ethereum limiter of Nvidia RTX 3060 had been lifted, and today this information was officially confirmed by Nvidia. According to technology media The Verge, an Nvidia spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge: "Code used for internal development was accidentally included in the new driver, which removed the hash rate limiter on the RTX 3060 in certain configurations. The driver has now been deleted."

Although Nvidia has now removed this driver, Pandora's box has been opened. The mining community already knows that Nvidia's latest 470.05 Beta driver automatically unleashes the performance of most RTX 3060 cards, thereby increasing the hash rate for Ethereum mining. The image file of this driver can be easily found online, and Nvidia will not be able to prevent RTX 3060 owners from continuing to use this driver for mining purposes.

Reddit community shares posts about the deleted 470.05 driver

Previously, as the crypto market continued to rise, the graphics card competition between gamers and crypto miners became increasingly fierce. In order to balance the needs of gamers and crypto miners, Nvidia painstakingly added a hash rate limiter to the driver of its new gaming graphics card RTX 3060, thereby reducing the Ethereum mining hash rate of the RTX 3060 by half. At the same time, it announced plans to launch a cryptocurrency mining processor (CMP) to serve Ethereum miners.

This mistake undoubtedly put all its previous efforts to waste.

According to BitPush's previous report, Nvidia RTX product public relations Bryan Del Rizzo revealed in a tweet last month that he was very confident about the limiter. He wrote: "The limiter is not just the driver. Instead, there is a secure handshake authentication (handshake) between the driver, the RTX 3060 chip and the BIOS (firmware) that prevents the hash rate limiter from being deleted."

When a rumor spread on Twitter six days ago that Chinese Ethereum miners had cracked Nvidia's hash rate limiter, many crypto experts also expressed their trust in Nvidia's technology. Cryptocurrency mining expert Kristy-Leigh Minehan once revealed that "to crack the limiter, miners need a private key from Nvidia to verify the custom driver and video BIOS, as well as a "phones home" tool that can modify the video BIOS, and new drivers (on their build servers), and they need records of all the above."

She also said at the time: "The only way to successfully break the limiter is to have an internal Nvidia employee with both a verified video BIOS and a new driver version."

Now it seems that her words at the time were indeed a "divine prophecy". No outsider cracked Nvidia's hash rate limiter. Nvidia "unlocked" its own limiter. (Bitpush)