If the choice was between restricting food - i.e making it less profitable to burn, to make it more available to the hungry and letting food be free and the hungry starve, then that's a pick between the best of two bad options. Clearly it's better to feed people than let food be unrestricted.

In this case though the choice is between restricting hardware to give gamers more affordable GPUs. The benefit doesn't match the cost.

The principle is something like freedom or ownership. Arbitrary restrictions are bad because freedom is good. By definition arbitrary restrictions aren't needed (arbitrary) and reduce freedom (restriction).

Freedom is only good until an incentive aligns that causes harm to the long-term stability of an industry or society. Right now, people who want to create value cannot do so because a paperclip maximizer has found a way to exploit the system for its own gain. Nvidia's move, futile as it may be, aims to maintain the stability of the GPU market for professionals and consumers, the actual value producers of society. Crypto mining does not produce true value commensurate to the burden it is currently placing on all other industries that use computing power.

The economist in me can't help but state the obvious: If those other industries were doing something so much more valuable, they'd aurely be willing to pay just as much for GPUs.

Of course, it's not really the big value-producing activities getting hit here, it's gaming.

You missed the (extremely good) point that istorical is making.

The argument in this subthread has been over whether we should be mad at Nvidia on principle. For example, as capableweb puts it:

> What worth is a principle if you don't still have it when it get challenged? Then it's just a opinion, which is fine by itself and it's ok to change opinion, smart people do it all the time. But don't call it a principle.

You seemingly agreed with a "principled" reading of the situation: "That strikes me as almost morally wrong. I tell the computer what to do. It doesn't tell me what to do."

istorical is arguing, by giving an extreme case, that we don't have a consistent principle against limiting the capabilities of a product when it will benefit a customer who matters more.

After all, if we've agreed that it's morally wrong to "cripple" a product, then what worth is that principle if we abandon it during a crisis? Let the people starve! You're rightly repulsed by that idea, and so you're retreating to the position that we're just going with a cost/benefit analysis. Preventing food from being burned has a cost and a benefit. Preventing GPUs from being used for crypto has a cost and a benefit.

The thing is, this gives up the supposed moral high ground that many in this thread have tried to promote as a reason to be mad at Nvidia. From the perspective you present, it's perfectly reasonable to look at the situation and say that preventing GPUs from being used for crypto will have more benefit than cost. (I certainly think so!) There's no inconsistency you can draw out of someone weighing the various benefits and costs differently than you do.

No, I think I addressed that point directly. It is morally wrong, or against principle, in my view to do things that cause people to starve to death and to impose arbitrary limits on things. When the only possible choice is between two wrongs, letting people starve or limiting the combustibility of our food, we should pick the least-wrong of the two options - limit food combustibility in order to feed more of the starving.

This is not abandoning a principle but rather picking a higher principle to follow when two or more principles conflict. The point I was making is that we are not currently in this situation. We aren't starving people by denying them access to the latest and greatest graphics cards for cheap.