Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> Their intent is to limit what people can do with their hardware.

Not really. The intent is to get graphics cards in the hands of gamers and professionals, instead of in the hands of crypto miners.

That is the end goal here. If you have a better solution, of how to do this without people getting around it via reselling, ect , please suggest it.



> Not really. The intent is to get graphics cards in the hands of gamers and professionals, instead of in the hands of crypto miners.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but why doesn't nVidia just make the best cards they can, and sell them for the highest price they can? What does nVidia care if their customers are using their cards for gaming or mining?


> What does nVidia care if their customers are using their cards for gaming or mining?

Because it makes a lot of business sense to prioritize the long time gamer customer base, as opposed to the crypto market, which could disappear very quickly.

Prioritizing certain customers, that will be around in the future, makes a lot of sense.

It also helps build a gaming ecosystem. If gamers don't have graphics cards, then the gaming ecosystem as a whole suffers, and could hurt their future business.


My solution is not to do that. Make and sell the cards to the people who will buy them. If you're selling out make more and/or raise prices.


> If you're selling out make more and/or raise prices.

What if you want to raise prices only to crypto miners, and not raise them for gamers/professions, in order to support your long term customers?

There are lots of very good business reasons to provide preferential treatment to a specific customer base, and to raise prices on a different customer base.

It is called price discrimination, and is very useful.

Do you not support companies making obvious business decisions like this, with their own company, that have large benefits to their existing customer base, as well as being perfectly rational from a business perspective?

Having crypto miners subsidize an existing customer base, makes a lot of business sense, and helps out a lot of people.

And it is all done, with people making voluntary decisions with the products that they choose to sell. Don't buy the product, if you don't like it.


If you want to help long term customers send discounts to people who have bought cards before. You don't need to cripple the devices.

I don't support companies making the choice to limit their compute. I think companies should sell general purpose computers.


> send discounts to people

No, this doesn't solve the problem.

Because what they want to do is ensure that the cards are not resold to miners, and instead stay in the hands of long term customers.

> You don't need to cripple the devices

First of all, they aren't crippled for the existing customers. They are only limited, for this other use case that the company doesn't care about.

And they do need to limit that functionality, if they want to prevent those cards from being resold to crypto miners.

> I don't support companies

Then don't purchase their product, if you don't like it. That is kind of the point of all of this. They don't want you as a customer. And it is their company, that they can do what they want with.


Okay, so the end result is exactly the same for one of two groups: miners or gamers. Nvidia just gets to choose which group gets access to cards.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: