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.
