Last month, NVIDIA announced a feature that would limit the Ethereum mining hash rate on the newly released RTX 3060 graphics card. This was great news for regular users since miners would find it harder to use the RTX 3060 for crypto mining, helping keep supply available for those who really need the card.
However, in an unexpected turn, just a few days ago, NVIDIA accidentally unlocked this mining limit themselves, allowing the RTX 3060 to run Ethereum mining at full power.
Today, NVIDIA confirmed this was a major mistake. “A developer driver accidentally included code used during internal development that can remove the hash rate limit on the RTX 3060,” a NVIDIA spokesperson said. “That driver has now been removed.”
Although NVIDIA deleted the driver, it was too late. Miners already had the key to unlock the full power of the RTX 3060 mining rigs. The latest NVIDIA beta driver version 470.05 can automatically bypass the performance limit on most RTX 3060 cards for Ethereum mining. Miners can still find and download copies of this driver online, and NVIDIA has no way to stop that.
Previously, NVIDIA was confident in the mining limit on the RTX 3060. They even believed it was impossible to unlock. NVIDIA’s head of communications, Bryan Del Rizzo, stated: “It’s not just a special driver. There’s solid security between the driver, the RTX 3060 chip, and the BIOS to ensure this feature can’t be unlocked.”
Now, things have completely changed. A small mistake caused a huge problem!
Source: theverge
