Nvidia is Nerfing New RTX 3080 and 3070 Cards for Ethereum Cryptocurrency Mining (theverge.com) 122
Nvidia is extending its cryptocurrency mining limits to newly manufactured GeForce RTX 3080, RTX 3070, and RTX 3060 Ti graphics cards. From a report: After nerfing the hash rates of the RTX 3060 for its launch in February, Nvidia is now starting to label new cards with a "Lite Hash Rate" or "LHR" identifier to let potential customers know the cards will be restricted for mining. "This reduced hash rate only applies to newly manufactured cards with the LHR identifier and not to cards already purchased," says Matt Wuebbling, Nvidia's head GeForce marketing.
"We believe this additional step will get more GeForce cards at better prices into the hands of gamers everywhere." These new RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, and RTX 3080 cards will start shipping later this month, and the LHR identifier will be displayed in retail product listings and on the box. Nvidia originally started hash limiting with the RTX 3060, and the company has already committed to not limiting the performance of GPUs already sold.
"We believe this additional step will get more GeForce cards at better prices into the hands of gamers everywhere." These new RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, and RTX 3080 cards will start shipping later this month, and the LHR identifier will be displayed in retail product listings and on the box. Nvidia originally started hash limiting with the RTX 3060, and the company has already committed to not limiting the performance of GPUs already sold.
I won't buy one .... (Score:1)
It's been years since I felt like messing with a mining rig, but on principle, I want a video card that doesn't artificially restrict what can be done with it.
When it comes time to resell one, the unlocked ones you can use for mining will have much better resale value.
And who knows? I might decide to repurpose one for mining in the future if some new crypto-coin comes alone that's feasible to mine with a GPU?
The real issue here is nVidia's inability to gear up manufacturing enough to meet the demand.
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Charge more money for the part.
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Charge more money for the part.
Here is the problem Nvidia has. Crypto mining demand is tied to crypto prices, which fluctuate widely. Gaming demand is more or less constant. Nvidia has constant production rate (fab) that is Very Expensive to scale up.
Your choices:
a)Shrink your gaming market share due to lack of product availability or high prices
b) Scale up production at great expense and then have it sit idle
c) Find a way to reserve some of your production for gamers.
For example, I am in the market for RTX 3070, but I am not even bot
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Hell I'm still using my 2 old sli evga GeForce 670 ftw editions. I've got many games I play just fine on full, like gta 5, Fallout 4, latest far cry, no man's sky, all the mass effect, all dragon ages and many of those games around those years, from dead space 3, to wasteland 2, and all the Borderlands, but Ive been more casual and enjoying minecraft which even "pimped out" with shaders and texture packs I get 90-120fps. Plus I'm a very broke s.o.b. hehe so when I see the prices of these new cards even the
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Hopefully it will work out for you and everyone else. I'm not a crypto-miner, but I'm also not a really serious gamer; I let my games stay recreational. I also write code to run on GPUs and such just for kicks or for educational purposes. *I* wouldn't buy a restricted card on principle, but apparently NVidia believes a lot of people will, and that it's somehow good for their bottom line to generate a new SKU for that group.
Again, good luck.
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If it takes 6 months to ramp up production, offer 6 month preorders at a fair price. No refunds.
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nVidia benefits more from selling video cards to gamers than cryptocurrency miners. Why? A sale is a sale, right? Not quite: a gamer who goes from 40fps medium settings to 120fps super settings brags to their friends, who then want the card. So I bet every 3000-series video card produces demand for 0.1 more 3000-series cards. But yet more -- Game developers then up the ante on the games by adding ray tracing, better physics, etc. So soon gamers *need* the new high-end video cards to play the games. T
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Network effect is far stronger with miners than it can ever be with gamers. This is because of how proof of work crypto is generated in case of currencies like ethereum, where amount of currency generated per time slot is stable regardless of amount of work done by all miners in total.
That means that the more powerful total GPU capacity of all miners, the more work each miner has to put in for the same return. So every time someone in the pool adds a new GPU, everyone else loses income. And the only way to
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the unlocked ones you can use for mining will have much better resale value.
Will they? So far it seems like the economics of mining have made it the case that miners really only want to spend the power and cooling running the fastest GPUs they get their hands on. Realistically the better marginal value in used last generation GPUs would be for people what want them for gaming.
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Perfect. Nvidia's strategy working as intended.
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Re:I won't buy one .... (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, but were you going to buy an unlocked one? How? Where? Personally, I like video cards that are currently available for purchase at MSRP. I have zero desire to mine anything anytime in the foreseeable future. I never resell video cards, I run them until they die of old age, then I buy a new one.
Th real issue here is we are in a global pandemic that is fucking the supply chains of nearly every industry, and my current video card has died, so I want to purchase a new one. I loudly applaud NVidia's decision to screw miners, as it means I have a better chance of getting what I want.
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I like video cards that are currently available for purchase at MSRP.
No kidding.
I loudly applaud NVidia's decision to screw miners, as it means I have a better chance of getting what I want.
I'll second that. I've been riding a 5 year old video card for those specific reasons. I'm not paying 1.5-2x retail.
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Not with the price I pay for electricity, and given that I don't want to invest energy into a shitcoin. Also have moral qualms about the whole crypto ecosystem, from the potential for scams to its use for purchasing CP to the enormous energy usage.
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The real issue here is nVidia's inability to gear up manufacturing enough to meet the demand.
Nvidia is fabless and there is a global shortage of fab capacity.
TSMC is their primary fabber and has a huge backlog.
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The real issue here is nVidia's inability to gear up manufacturing enough to meet the demand.
Eh, you don't understand how this works.
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Re: I won't buy one .... (Score:2)
When it comes time to resell one, the unlocked ones you can use for mining will have much better resale value.
Makes sense, you'll have paid a premium to have an 'un-restricted' video card, so it should resell at a similar premium.
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It's been years since I felt like messing with a mining rig, but on principle, I want a video card that doesn't artificially restrict what can be done with it.
The artificial restriction is to allow you to be able to buy one of the video cards at all.
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the unlocked ones you can use for mining will have much better resale value.
I suggest you research this. Mining is very bad for the cards. [youtube.com]
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Not really scientiific... what happens to a 2 year old card that wasn't mined with? What about one that was heavily gamed on?
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There was some talk that Nvidia would unlock the full potential .... I don't know 6 months or a year after the card was sold. It's in their interest after all to keep 2nd hand prices high.
Can't wait until... (Score:1)
But... (Score:2)
"We believe this additional step will get more GeForce cards at better prices into the hands of gamers everywhere."
The problem with this is the nerfed hashrate on the 3060, and presumably the newer nerfed cards, is still higher than a 1660 Super/Ti and miners are more than willing to buy those at obscene prices. These new cards will have a better hashrate, better resale value AND have the potential that the nerf can be broken at some point in the future. There's no reason at all to think this will deter m
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Hilarious (Score:1)
Propaganda (Score:2)
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They're not making crypto-only cards, they're making crypto-unfriendly cards. It shouldn't impact their resale value to other gamers later on.
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They are actually making both kind of GPUs for different markets.
The crypto-only GPUs are made with the video-out portion fused off, probably because it did not pass testing. NVidia would have trashed such chips if they hadn't been able to sell them to "miners".
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They are actually making both kind of GPUs for different markets.
The crypto-only GPUs are made with the video-out portion fused off, probably because it did not pass testing. NVIDIA would have trashed such chips if they hadn't been able to sell them to "miners".
Technically NVIDIA doesn't manufacture chips at all; they're an R&D company. They produce the designs and outsource the actual production.
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Doubtful they have many that don't pass testing.
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Basicly, Nvidia wants their cut of the crypto market by selling mining cards for double, without trashing their traditional gamer market who they see as their strategic market, whilst miners are fly by night. They want to have a bit of cake and eat it too. And Nvidia doesn't care about the 2nd hand gamer market, except in so far as it affects their sales. They'd be not entirely unhappy if 2nd hand cards went away actually.
If I buy one... (Score:2)
I keep picturing this: (Score:2)
A few people want to buy Caterpillar bucket excavators to have jousting battles with while a whole bunch of other people want to dig for lithium ore.
If you take this a step further, a lot of games are subscription-based which means that the game companies are losing money when people mine cryptocurrency.
Uh huh... (Score:2)
And how soon are they going to self-own and "inadvertently" release the bypass for this?
Until they accidentally release the unlock (Score:4, Interesting)
Big talk from a company that "accidentally" released drivers that unlock mining capabilities a few weeks after the last time they made this broad announcement.
Legal precdence (Score:3)
This will become a slippery slope. If a manufacturer can determine your usage of a product just to make sure they can sell you another product of the same exact nature, you can see more and more manufacturers do the same thing.
Why sell you a barbecue when they can sell you two simply with a software configuration? Barbecue A only heats up to 400 degrees. Barbecue B only can sustain temperatures between 400 and 500. If you want to cook something for lower temperatures but for long periods of time you will have to buy A. If you want to cook something with higher and sustained temps you will have to get B. You can't just buy one now because they made deliberately crippled their own device just so they can sell you more because they can't trust you with it.
Barbecue B are for the "pros". Barbecue A is the "lite" version.
Freemium - it means free, but not really.
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Or just go with the alternative with no internet connection fuckery.
This is DRM, they can control what apps you run (Score:2)
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This is nothing new in the software space. Pay more and get Windows PRO. In a world where 90% of the functionality comes from software, you'll see it more often.
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Not to mention, Teslas that can only self-drive if you pay a special fee. And can only super charge if your license is up to date. I believe there are even things like pre-fitted seat heaters that only work with the right fee paid to Tesla.
Come on bubble, pop already! (Score:2)
The bigger fool scheme has gone on much longer than I could ever have imagined, still not sure if it will go on for days or decades yet. It is still just money laundering and speculation. No significant transacting is actually occurring. Now the joke crap like Doge and Shiba are getting piled into and making the news. It was funnier when it was the Blockchain Lemonade headline.
I'll shed zero tears when it all comes back to earth.
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There's also a lot of interest in crypto in parts of the world that don't have access to traditional banking. And smart contracts give Ethereum a lot of potential uses.
Is there a lot of speculation still going on with crypto; sure. Is it possible that the value of Bitcoin drops signif
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Crypto is a hedge against fiat currency. The US enjoys a relatively stable currency.
But what if you live somewhere where the currency/environment isn't... the best? Think high inflation or excessive taxation, etc.
Scroll down here to see the top countries adopting crypto currencies by some metrics, you will see my point:
https://blog.chainalysis.com/r... [chainalysis.com]
A volatile crypto currency is a better bet than a guaranteed high rate of inflation or other fiat currency degradation. Third world demand will continue to
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No, crypto is a ponzi scheme. People can't see it because of all the techno babble associated with it.
Yeah, that's what I want to hear from Nvidia :| (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure the majority of folks only want to hear one thing from Nvidia at this point: When the F do you plan to address
the shortage so someone other than scalpers and miners might be able to get their hands on a current gen GPU ?
It's like Sony showing off all the amazing things the PS5 is capable of, except they tend to overlook that very few folks have :|
managed to get their hands on one of those either.
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And how would you suggest they "address" it, given they don't have their own chip fabs?
Re:How many gamers ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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And electricity, which costs more at normal residential rates than the currency it generates.
FTFY.
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And electricity, which costs more at normal residential rates than the currency it generates.
FTFY.
No, it's no where near costing more than the coin it generates. I could pay my entire power bill for the month with around 12-14 days of mining on my 3090 when it's not being used. That's the ENTIRE bill, not just the mining portion, and that is today. Some months when payouts are hot, it's maybe 3-5 days. Paying for just the power used mining for a month is probably 3-4 days worth of mining profits on the high end, less than a day when the market is hot like last week.
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Depends, many people live in rented accommodation where power is included in the rent, or living with others (eg parents) where the electrical cost is someone else's problem. In cases like these, it makes no sense to leave a system off or operating in a power save mode when not being used, if it can be earning a trivial amount mining then it's basically free.
Very bad argument against mining (Score:2)
And electricity, which probably costs more at normal residential rates than the currency it generates.
It costs more than the currency is worth NOW.
But people were saying exactly that back when you would use maybe $20 of electricity to mine one or two BTC, worth at the time maybe $10... and then later on worth $40k.
Was that really too expensive to mine?
If you are mining now and ETH continues to grow, the electricity you expend now may be a tiny fraction of what you eventually gain. If you are even close to
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And for those of us in Canada, with electric heating, green power production and low cost per kWh, it makes no sense not to do any crypto-mining. The so-called "waste heat" is actually useful and would have used electricity anyway.
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And for those of us in Canada, with electric heating, green power production and low cost per kWh, it makes no sense not to do any crypto-mining. The so-called "waste heat" is actually useful and would have used electricity anyway.
I'm in Canada and it's 77F (25C) here right now. I won't be surprised if the air-conditioner gets turned on tonight.
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Depends on your location and your house configuration. Without any heating, the basement would be too cold. Tomorrow is supposed to be hot, but the rest of the week not so much (below 20C).
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I was in Southern Alberta [1] last week for some work (not the bitcoin), it's not fully populated yet (500 KW), but the natural gas turbine can output 3MW.
It's was quick toasty (and loud) in between. He's been ordering ASICs from China [2].
[1] https://i.imgur.com/IzDKC5T.jp... [imgur.com]
[2] https://i.imgur.com/7mkOXJU.jp... [imgur.com]
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But people were saying exactly that back when you would use maybe $20 of electricity to mine one or two BTC, worth at the time maybe $10... and then later on worth $40k.
The difference now is you can go to an exchange and buy a BTC for $45k, instead of spending $90k in electricity for it.
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you would use maybe $20 of electricity to mine one or two BTC, worth at the time maybe $10... and then later on worth $40k.
Was that really too expensive to mine?
Do you really understand WHAT you just said?
Yes. It was 100% too expensive. You could have taken the $20 you paid for electricity and just bought TWICE as many coins.
If the price of mining a coin TODAY exceeds the price of just buying one, and you want a coin for future price speculation then you'd have to be spectacularly bad at math to mine them yourself at double what it would cost you to buy them.
If you are mining now and ETH continues to grow, the electricity you expend now may be a tiny fraction of what you eventually gain. If you are even close to break even at current value then I can see where it is 100% worth the effort to try, because of the potential upside.
Let's spell it out with a concrete example: The price of gold is going up over time, and you think it will g
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" I am simply pointing out mining can yield gains even if on the face of it the electricity used seems to cost more, so claiming that electricity costs make mining worthless is a bad claim,"
It is not bad claim. It is absolutely the correct analysis; the electricity expense adds NEGATIVE value. That makes it not just worthless, but LESS THAN WORTHLESS.
Let's simplify it even more - by eliminating the dollar:
Suppose you started with 1 bitcoin. And you used that bitcoin to mine more bitcoin (ie you paid for you
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"Was that really too expensive to mine?"
Yes, it was too expensive to mine. You could have taken that $20 of electricity it cost to mine one bitcoin, and purchased two on the open market.
Re:How many gamers ... (Score:4, Funny)
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Not even close. I have a mining rig with three 1070s (purchased for mining four years ago, so they're long since paid off) producing somewhere around $200-$250 per month, burning maybe $50-$60 worth of electricity (at $0.10/kWh) to do so. I would upgrade to newer GPUs, but they appear to be made of unobtainium.
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I actually use a 3070 to mine Ethereum and make more than $50/week which well exceeds electricity costs.
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I would say few as there is little money in mining under these conditions.
I've made over $900 this year just casually mining on my 3090 when I'm not using it for other things (video editing, gaming). That's over half the price of the card recouped in 5 months. Even with power factored in it's over $700 in profit for essentially clicking a button.
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Source? Purely anecdotal, but I've been mining Etherium on my gaming desktop (2070 Super), and I have three other computers in my house that mine, and I haven't seen any noticeable increase in my power bill. For me mining is quite profitable, probably about $150-$300 a month in cryptocurrency.
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I would say few as there is little money in mining under these conditions. The vast majority of mining requires lots of GPU processing time and dedicated hardware.
Are you just saying that or can you actually show some math? I haven't done the math but I know someone who has actual results. His RTX 3090 has been paid off leaving his computer on overnight Ethereum mining, and that includes his electricity bill in the not so cheap UK electricity market.
Sure, he's not going to be buying a Lamborghini but at least he's recovered the cost of his very expensive hardware.
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Re:How many gamers ... (Score:4, Informative)
Nerf
/nf/
verbinformalUS
past participle: nerfing; gerund or present participle: nerfing
cause to be weak or ineffective.
"the constant zone running nerfed Michigan's pass rush"
(of a video game developer) reduce the power of (a character, weapon, etc.) in a new instalment or update of a video game.
noun: nerfing
"ever since they nerfed the shield, the game just isn't as fun"
Origin
1970s: apparently an arbitrary formation.
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But the first nerf gun was launched in 1989, so it seems unlikely to be the origin of a term coined in the 70s.
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Re:How many gamers ... (Score:4, Interesting)
If it is like the 3060 technique, if the GPU detects it is computing crypto hashes, it throttles the GPU down after like 30 minutes. It does affect energy efficiency slightly but more importantly it takes much longer to do the computations.
A way of working around this is to possibly run rotate the GPU processing time off and on. This however would require even more GPUs. Another way would be to trick the GPU somehow so that it does not think it is computing hashes.
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Or just reset the card and reload the driver every 30 minutes. You end up with a short interruption while it comes back online, but it runs at full speed the rest of the time. That doesn't seem like it would be very difficult to automate, at least in a multi-GPU Linux system—I can trivially remove and reinstall the nvidia driver with no interruption on my laptop since primary rendering and scan-out are handled by the integrated graphics chip and the Nvidia hardware is only used through Primus (pvkrun)
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But.... the firmware is detecting the hashing, not the driver, so flipping out the driver might not work. If it was the driver detecting it, someone would easily figure out where in memory it is storing the counter and reset it. I suppose a reboot would work.. but then again if the card maintains enough power to keep that register populated...
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The driver loads the firmware, so reloading the driver should reset the state of the firmware. In case it doesn't, the PCI reset via /sys/bus/pci/... while the driver is unloaded should ensure that the card is fully reinitialized. In the worst case it might be necessary to fully remove power from the card, though that design risks carrying over faults or invalid state across reboots and would probably be more trouble than it would be worth. Even if a power cycle is required this could be defeated by placing
It refers to a series of foam toys (Score:2)
racing use predates the foam toys too (Score:2)
In their case it's a noun. In racing it's a verb. The word was so attractive it was seized on then and now.
"Nerfing" is from racing not computing (Score:2, Informative)
"Nerfing" in this context is some shit the writer made up though a pre-internet use of the term refers to impacts in auto racing hence the term "nerf bar".
The use of the term in a computer context is to put it politely, fucking stupid. "Neutering" would be the natural term but that's now involved with gender issues while "crippled" is now ableist (fuck that, I'm a cripple and don't need neo-Victorian maudlin euphemism to make me feel better about being crippled because I don't cultivate weakness).
An approp
Re:"Nerfing" is from racing not computing (Score:5, Informative)
So confident, angry, and wrong.
The usage (noted already by others) in reducing the power of a character/weapon/etc is not a stretch when talking about a graphics card and use for gaming (vs mining).
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Yeah, it's purely anecdotal but - I've never heard anyone who wasn't a nerd use the term "nerf", unless they were referring to an actual Nerf Gun [hasbro.com].
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the term has been in general use for non-car things for decades, since I was a kid in the 80s at least
sounds like you should possibly retire as a self-appointed authority of how and when words should be used
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nerf
To weaken or make less dangerous. Taken from the "Nerf" brand name, which makes sports equipment toys out of a soft foam (e.g., the Nerf football is soft foam rather than the hard leather of a real football). Used frequently in the context of computer game balance changes.
"The chaingun was awesome til they nerfed it, now you can't hit shit with it."
by PecosBill June 06, 2003
https://www.urbandictionary.co... [urbandictionary.com]
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It's a slang term that's been around for a few decades, predominately in gaming circles, and is synonymous with "weaken" or "a weakness", depending on if it's being used as a verb or noun, respectively (though "nerf" as a noun sounds awkward and is less common). The term is derived from the Nerf brand of foam toy weapons, and is presumably based on the idea that a Nerf weapon is a weak substitute for an actual weapon. In gaming circles its antonym is "buff", meaning "strengthen" or "a strength" (again, base
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(though "nerf" as a noun sounds awkward and is less common)
Actually, it's commonly used as a noun. It's used as a drop in replacement for the noun "change" when talking about a change that weakens.
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Will gamers invest in hardware that is restricted? Even if their primary use will be gaming?
Yes. (Sample size of one) I have absolutely zero interest in crypto mining. None. Zip. Zero. Zilch.
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How many? I don't think many at all.
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I can't wait to see Dogecoin's value skyrocket once Elon Musk' plans to send Dogecoins to the actual moon. How he's going to do that, no idea. Is it going to be a simple paper wallet? Or an electronic wallet? I don't see him picking a single vendor as it would impact all their competitors. What about the QR codes of a paper wallet, but CNC-machined in an aluminium plate?
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I already sent them to the moon. I encoded them with a laser beam and aimed it from my backyard.