No, the GeForce RTX 3060 mining lock was not bypassed

For some hours the news has been circulating that the software limiter that Nvidia put it on GeForce RTX 3060 12GB was it bypassed to bring the card’s performance in Ethereum mining to the highest level, up to 45 MH / s. Well, no cot. No “Chinese” has changed the firmware or drivers of the card, at the moment none of this has happened, only the desire to quickly report a potentially bombshell news.

What happened? Yesterday morning a Twitter account called I_Leak_VN released a screenshot of a mining software showing eight GeForce RTX 3060s mining, reaching a hash rate of around 45 MH / s each, for a total of over 362 MH / s. The image was cropped (or as young people say “cropped”) and you couldn’t actually see which cryptocurrency was being mined and the algorithm involved.

PC Gamer threw himself on the news, without being too scrupulous, and threw the bomb: RTX 3060 hacked, Nvidia and its “not hackable” KO limiter. And many have gone after it (it happens). The thing to us for “smelled a bit”, so we decided to wait and within a few hours the picture changed, and it turned out that the GPUs weren’t undermining Ethereum but Conflux, based on the Octopus algorithm. We are talking about a different algorithm.

In fact, we must remember what Nvidia said when announcing the limiter: “Ethereum it currently has the highest yield among GPU-mineable coins and thus arguably the main driver of GPU demand in mining. Other algorithms do not contribute significantly to the demand for GPUs and this state of affairs cannot change rapidly due to the network effects within a given cryptocurrency. The speed limiter applies to anything using Dagger Hashimoto or Ethash-like algorithms“.

In short, no modded firmware or modified drivers, simply the cards were put to work on an algorithm not covered by the limiter. This on the one hand means that there is a “no news” circulating, at the same time it tells us that if Conflux mining were to become profitable for some reason, no GPU would have adequate countermeasures, not even the RTX 3060.

a little ‘the game of cat and mouse: if Nvidia really wants to try to safeguard the sales of video cards to gamers, it will eventually have to respond. And since updating the firmware of video cards is not common nor fast, we have to enjoy the limiter while it lasts, hoping that in parallel Nvidia increases the production of GPUs. Also because, with a lot of courage, the company declared that “the software cannot be hacked to remove the filter”: we hope it really is, but we have seen too many twists …