NVIDIA Suggests Cryptomining Only Contributes to a Small Portion of Its Gaming Revenue

[Tsing]

Image: NVIDIA



Cryptomining has been cited as a major factor behind the drought of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards, but the actual amount of miners who are snatching up Ampere GPUs might be somewhat exaggerated. The possibility stems from recent remarks made by Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress, who spoke during yesterday’s Q4 2021 earnings call and echoed estimates from analysts who claim that cryptomining only contributed $100 to $300 million to NVIDIA’s Q4 gaming revenue. Green team managed to make a record $2.5 billion from its gaming segment in Q4 2021, so those figures, if accurate, would suggest that there are more influential factors at play behind the global GPU drought.



“Analyst estimate suggest that cryptomining contributed 100 million to 300 million to our Q4 revenue, a relatively small portion...

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[Brian_B]

Hahahahahah

tell me another one. This is nVidia trying to convince shareholders this isn’t another bubble about to blow up in their faces again

 

[MadMummy76]

Wait, so mining is a game? Miners are gamers? LOL

BTW Q4 2021? Are they also time travelers?

 

[Auer]

Hahahahahah

tell me another one. This is nVidia trying to convince shareholders this isn’t another bubble about to blow up in their faces again

Pretty sure crypto will get regulated at some point. People want to profit, but with more stability.
And enviromental concerns will eventually weigh in.

Janet Yellen says using bitcoin is an 'extremely inefficient' way to transact

Yellen expressed concerns that the cryptocurrency is used "often for illicit finance." Bitcoin pared gains on Monday after topping $58,000 on Sunday.

markets.businessinsider.com

 

[Riccochet]

lol...federal reserve chairman complaining about people not using the fiat currency she manages.

imagine that!

Brian B is spot on. They're just trying to hide the amount of GPU's they sold directly to chinese mining firms.

 

[Auer]

lol...federal reserve chairman complaining about people not using the fiat currency she manages.

imagine that!

Brian B is spot on. They're just trying to hide the amount of GPU's they sold directly to chinese mining firms.

So you want more mining or less mining?

 

[Riccochet]

So you want more mining or less mining?

I don't care either way. I mine and game.

 

[Brian_B]

I think there are three things that will curb mining

The first is just the market / loss of confidence. If the price falls, mining will fall with it. Maybe not to 0, but you lose all the opportunistic profit chasers. That could happen any day, all it takes is one bad tweet or event.

The second is regulation. It could get regulated, possibly to death. That takes governments and agencies to do something, and none of them are swift, so that won't happen soon.

The third would be hitting the cap. There is no infinite profit potential - there is a cap somewhere on everything. Bitcoin more or less hit it, where it's no longer profitable to mine any longer, if the other currencies don't have some sort of cap, or just keep forking themselves to try to stay relevelent, they will just dilute the overall market. There's only so much money willing and able to be invested out there, so even if there is no software cap on the algorithm, there's a ceiling. I don't think this will happen soon either before folks realize they are just buying tulips, but it's another scenario.

And I guess a forth would be total social collapse, but I don't like to think about that one.

 

[Riccochet]

You have two groups of miners.

1. Long game miners. They don't care about the market fluctuations. They're stacking coins and collecting their profits when the market rips.

2. Profit chasers, short term miners. These guys see the market getting hot, buy a bunch of cards, mine for 3-6 months, then lose interest because the market corrected and their immediate profits went to poo.

The #2 miners, their cards will be for sale in May, at inflated prices, but they won't sell because a massive surge of used cards will hit the market. Which should drive the used market pricing down. This is where the #1 miners will swoop in and buy them up at cheaper prices, and gamers can get in on that actions as well. Figure June/July.

Me. I'll let my little mining rig run 24/7/365 like it has been for 4 years now just stackin that ETH. I've already cashed out about 10x worth of USD than what I paid for my mining rig. And it's still making money.

And if Kyle is reading this, no, your 2080Ti is not mining. My gaming rig is gaming only.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

You have two groups of miners.

1. Long game miners. They don't care about the market fluctuations. They're stacking coins and collecting their profits when the market rips.

2. Profit chasers, short term miners. These guys see the market getting hot, buy a bunch of cards, mine for 3-6 months, then lose interest because the market corrected and their immediate profits went to poo.

The #2 miners, their cards will be for sale in May, at inflated prices, but they won't sell because a massive surge of used cards will hit the market. Which should drive the used market pricing down. This is where the #1 miners will swoop in and buy them up at cheaper prices, and gamers can get in on that actions as well. Figure June/July.

Me. I'll let my little mining rig run 24/7/365 like it has been for 4 years now just stackin that ETH. I've already cashed out about 10x worth of USD than what I paid for my mining rig. And it's still making money.

And if Kyle is reading this, no, your 2080Ti is not mining. My gaming rig is gaming only.

Not gonna lie or hide it. I've got GPus mining in rigs I've built over the last decade. I watched the GPU resale market plummet before and during Turing. Now during this insanity I've watched those same cards combined worth become more than what I paid for my 3090. Add in that I've remade almost the same and its not really a guilt for using them.

I'm also a gamer. I've been pushing the limits of what tech can give for over 30 years and the current situation sucks. I would be much happier if prices were down and we were all happier and enjoying what we could get. I hate that we're all at ends just trying to enjoy some basic needs. A 3090 is extravagent no matter what but for all tiers, including two gens prior, to suffer like this is insane.

ASICS are not the answer. Mining only GPUs are not the answer. Mining will not go away, even with regulation. It can serve a purpose beyond revenue which means there will always be someone to do it since computational power is always needed for something. Making it profitable for ethical means while maintaining hardware supply chains is the answer. The days of creating localized super-computers for such needs is nearing an end when a global solution is possible.

I will only add that CPU manufacturers dropped the ball somewhat. GPU engineering took a different approach in the last couple of decades and gained a foothold most could never dream of for such technology. CPUs, at this point, are very low grade for computational power when it comes to ming but, meanwhile, GPU manufacturers have created a new pathway for such needs. Many a enthusiast complained when prices started rising in the early 2000s and now look where were at.

 

[Brian_B]

ASICS are not the answer. Mining only GPUs are not the answer. Mining will not go away, even with regulation. It can serve a purpose beyond revenue which means there will always be someone to do it since computational power is always needed for something

I don't mean to imply that I think mining will go away. As it remains profitable - larger entities will exploit that and start doing so at a scale that pushes out the garage miner. Just look at Bitcoin. ASICS aren't the answer, but they were an answer for that particular algorithm. Large mining-oriented entities aren't going to go around scrounging Best Buy or playing bot games to get their needs - they will go straight to the source, and if that doesn't work, they will either go around (ASICs) or buy out the source.

For example, you don't see Google going around buying up every blue light special hard drive from Amazon to fill their data centers. It's got to the point where they couldn't get what they needed third party, and are designing and manufacturing their own PSUs, and even CPUs. Mining will get to that scale as well, it won't continue to fool around with consumer-level equipment, or paying three different middle men various markups.

I think that crypto in general - above and beyond uses just for currency, will be around forever more. But in it's current iteration, it's too inefficient to see broad acceptance.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

I don't mean to imply that I think mining will go away. As it remains profitable - larger entities will exploit that and start doing so at a scale that pushes out the garage miner. Just look at Bitcoin. ASICS aren't the answer, but they were an answer for that particular algorithm. Large mining-oriented entities aren't going to go around scrounging Best Buy or playing bot games to get their needs - they will go straight to the source, and if that doesn't work, they will either go around (ASICs) or buy out the source.

For example, you don't see Google going around buying up every blue light special hard drive from Amazon to fill their data centers. It's got to the point where they couldn't get what they needed third party, and are designing and manufacturing their own PSUs, and even CPUs. Mining will get to that scale as well, it won't continue to fool around with consumer-level equipment, or paying three different middle men various markups.

I think that crypto in general - above and beyond uses just for currency, will be around forever more. But in it's current iteration, it's too inefficient to see broad acceptance.

Too true but that's always been the way with new means of income. 2.0 is around the corner and who knows what's after that. Odds are there's more none of us can imagine yet.

edit: I'll just add that at one point some thought oil was an annoyance when buying real estate.