Nvidia’s anti-Ethereum GPU lock won’t keep miners away from the RTX 3060

“Geforce Is Made for Gaming”, that’s what Nvidia claimed when they revealed the so-called “Ethereum Lock” on their RTX 3060 graphics card, a feature within the GPU VBIOS and drivers that intentionally hobbles the graphics card’s performance when mining the cryptocurrency Ethereum. 

The problem with this crypto lock is that it only impacts Ethereum mining, which means that RTX 3060 graphics cards will still be able to mine alternative cryptocurrencies without any issues, making them profitable cryptocurrency miners. While Nvidia has tackled Ethereum mining, they haven’t been able to deter cryptocurrency miners from the RTX 3060. 

According to CryptoLeo, a cryptocurrency-focused YouTuber who managed to get access to an early RTX 3060 graphics card, the RTX 3060 can generate over $6 per day in cryptocurrency using Octopus and Cortex miners. Using an Octopus miner, the RTX 3060 was only 5-7% slower than Nvidia’s RTX 3060 Ti, making the graphics cards plenty profitable for cryptocurrency miners. 

While Nvidia has been able to ruin the RTX 3060’s mining potential for Ethereum, the same is not true for other cryptocurrencies. This fact alone makes Nvidia’s marketing for the RTX 3060’s anti-crypto feature meaningless for gamers, as cryptocurrency miners will still find the GPUs useful for mining alternative cryptocurrencies. 

Tacking cryptocurrency mining with software is a challenging task for Nvidia, as it requires the company to find a way to differentiate mining workloads from other computational tasks. An anti-mining software solution from Nvidia is useless if it impacts other workloads and is even more useless if miners find a way to bypass the limiter. While Nvidia has done a good thing to gamers by hobbling Ethereum mining on their RTX 3060, it will not be enough to have any real impact on demand for graphics cards from large mining farms.