I don't want to mine cryptocurrency on my graphics card. So given the choice of buying an unrestricted one off ebay for $2500, or a restricted one for the originally suggested price of $800, I would rather buy the restricted one. Nvidia isn't being dishonest, they aren't throttling the cards they already sold, they aren't claiming anything is moral or immoral, they are just offering a new product that does exactly what I want for cheaper. So I'm certainly okay with it.

For example, they might believe that while selling to gamers is less lucrative than selling to miners in the short term, the gaming market will always exist while the mining market dries up the moment GPU mining is no longer profitable; so maintaining a good relationship with the gaming community is important for their long term health. Or maybe they're just tired of gamers yelling at them.

If you'd like to know how people are ok with this, it's been explained plenty already, right here in this discussion.

My guess is that NVIDIA doesn't want one basket of demand dominating the majority of their demand while disenfranching all of their other demands in parallel computing (graphics, industrial/scientific, etc.). If they allow crypto to take the lionshare of their cards, consumers for the other demands will eventually seek out alternatives if they haven't already. That's all well and fine as long as crypto demand sustains whatever NVIDIA can supply indefinitely.

It's not so great if crypto demand for GPUs drops drastically, then NVIDIA is sitting there looking to drum demand back up from all their previous customers and markets. Essentially, they're likely just trying to distribute risk for a future demand portfolio.

I can't honestly believe any large investors or top level executives at NVIDIA are losing a second of sleep by having so much demand they have to turn people away. If they're losing any sleep it's all the lost profit they can't make because they can't meet full demand or because they're in a potentially risky situation.

As an aside, businesses don't act on their own. People do have morals, and they're the ones running things. Whether or not they use their morals is a different question, but we needn't preemptively excuse them from doing so just because money is involved.

The government should never mandate that video card manufacturers do this, or don't do this.

If you don't like it, set up your own video card business that caters to crypto mining.

The vast majority of NVidia customers are applauding this move though.

This is the free market working, but if you're into crypto you may not like it because you're not winning the marketplace of ideas.

(And IMO if you support cryptocurrency you should appreciate this as well, because astronomically high GPU costs for gamers erodes the standing of cryptocurrencies in that demographic, it is very bad PR to just let GPU costs inflate -- people start to vehemently hate cryptocurrencies because of that effect).

Why would you prevent mining if some gamers do want to utilize their idle GPU power? Mining is supposed to be for everyone.