Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most unusual demands ever

Re:Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most ... by ckastner on Friday March 04, 2022 @02:20AM (#30551673)

> I don't understand how this demand helps the gaming community.

Agreed. But I don't understand how this helps the mining community, either.

Removing the LHR restriction would lead to a vast increase of the network hash rate, and consequently the difficulty would also increase, leading to lower rewards. The result would be that (1) non-LHR card owner's rewards go down significantly, and (2) LHR card owner's rewards probably wouldn't change much, perhaps even go down as well.

At least 80% of Nvidia GeForce cards sold since Summer 2021 have been LHR. That's a lot of hashing power locked up.

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Re:Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most ... by uncomputation on Friday March 04, 2022 @02:46AM (#30551828)

Yep, it’s the red queen’s race problem. If LHR is lifted, your hash rate will rise, but so will everyone else’s, so you are either (1) no better off or (2) worse off because other people may use this increased efficiency per chip to buy more chips, thus increasing their hash power proportionally. No one will ever decrease their hash power.

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Re:Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most ... by Leherenn on Friday March 04, 2022 @10:57AM (#30556485)

Won't your hash rate rise more than the average hash rate since not all cards are LHR cards?

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Re:Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most ... by ckastner on Friday March 04, 2022 @01:25PM (#30558445)

Yes, your slice of the pie would improve more than the average slice, but the size of the overall pie would be much smaller.

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Re:Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most ... by jimmydorry on Friday March 04, 2022 @05:27AM (#30552866)

At an individual level though, increasing the hash rate of your setup without impacting energy usage means more efficient mining (cheaper to run and faster to recoup investment). Long-term, the least efficienct miners get forced out until there is no profit to be had for the effort involved.

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Re:Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most ... by ckastner on Friday March 04, 2022 @07:10AM (#30553598)

> increasing the hash rate of your setup without impacting energy usage means more efficient mining

No, it just means you get more MH/s. It's also (probably) not cheaper to run, unless the cards actually draw less power as well.

Whether that's cost-efficient or not depends on the reward. And with hundreds of TH/s suddenly being freed from LHR, your individual reward will all but certainly go down.

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Re:Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most ... by jart on Friday March 04, 2022 @07:03AM (#30553538)

Yes, but no. The ransomers probably invested a considerable sum buying up every last used LHR card beforehand, so they'd stand to gain if Nvidia changed their policy. That's likely how they'll get caught.

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Re:Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most ... by ckastner on Friday March 04, 2022 @07:12AM (#30553611)

If they had tons of LHR cards and the code to unlock them, the last thing they would do is share the unlock code with others (= the competition).

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Re:Cybercriminals who breached Nvidia issue one of the most ... by jart on Friday March 04, 2022 @01:27PM (#30558454)

It's not like typing in a Faxanadu code. The ransomers are sitting on a mess of confidential information they lifted from Nvidia and they likely have zero clue how it all works. Keeping it to themselves was probably the original plan, but once they got a taste for how tragic engineering is behind the curtain their only chance for recuperating the investment became (1) forcing Nvidia to write the driver update for them; or (2) leak it and hope some open source developer volunteers.

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