NVIDIA gets serious about mining, hardware and software locks?

Well, it seems that from Huang headquarters they are looking suspiciously at mining in a time where their GPUs are scarce and where miners are like jackal waiting for units to be available. NVIDIA seems to be more than aware of this and the tension of its players, so it could be taking very serious measures against the purchase of its GPUs to mine cryptocurrencies. Are we facing the first hardware and software blocks against mining?

Anyone who knows NVIDIA well will know that its group of software engineers is almost twice that of hardware engineers and therefore they are referred to as "the green army" behind the scenes. Part of the success of the company is precisely in the software and it seems that the first measure to be taken could be a partial or total block against the mining of cryptocurrencies.

Goodbye to gaming GPUs for mining? Will the market be filled with second-hand graphics?

Jensen will start a battle against mining.

— kopite7kimi (@kopite7kimi) January 28, 2021

The controversial part of a Tweet from the famous leaker Kopite7kimi, which states that the CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, is going to start a battle against mining, despite the succulent dividends that he supposedly gives the company with the sale even for anticipated from your GPUs.

Why would NVIDIA hit and go into a profit-skyrocketing war? Well, for several reasons: mainly gaming GPUs are not a natural market for mining, which generates a second factor that is the lack of stock worldwide for players, giving way to the third step, which is the frustration of the average buyer and the consequent bad impression of these towards the brand, which is not much less interesting if we take into account the volume of GPUs that moves the gaming market.

How can NVIDIA end the problem? Because doing it once and for all, the second-hand market will fill with users selling their GPUs at lower and lower prices.

Does NVIDIA want to stop mining? software and hardware locks, but how?

The first block seems to come through a new driver that would not allow mining programs to recognize the GPU, so in principle, we are talking about a total block to mining, which should be driven by the imposition of software change in some way.

The second point is not at all clear, since we are talking about hardware locks, and here the software should also enter or be a tandem in the worst case. We do not know how the company intends to block by hardware a series of products that are already on the market without using the software.

Or they can refer to the new GPUs so that they integrate some control mechanism over these programs. The last case seems to be the most likely since it is rumored that NVIDIA would have agreed to create specific GPUs for mining, where they would share chip and features with their gaming counterparts, but without video outputs, or extra expensive heatsinks, with the smaller size of VRAM and possibly with the RT Cores and Tensor Cores disabled.

Does this make sense today? Can NVIDIA stop mining around the world with its GPUs? It seems that this is the case since AMD could also be thinking of a similar initiative, segmenting the two sectors and leaving room for each user to acquire the type of GPU they need, not stepping on the rival.