The situation fascinates me. It's one heck of an expression of capitalist market forces. Gamers can't get computational capacity for their graphics, because the market-clearing price for computing is the value of the cryptocurrency that that GPU could be mining instead. Every pixel you calculate has an opportunity cost of that calculation's worth in cryptocurrency.
Nvidia wants to serve gamers over miners, presumably to establish and maintain brand loyalty for future purchases. If they can't increase supply, the only other way is to reduce miner demand. That's their goal; this limitation is just a technical detail of implementing that. Hardware segmenting to serve different markets has been a thing forever and I don't see any reason to call this out as any worse.
That said, I like that Nvidia and AMD are taking different approaches here. That's free market capitalism, let the invisible hand guide the outcome.
Nvidia wants to serve gamers over miners, presumably to establish and maintain brand loyalty for future purchases. If they can't increase supply, the only other way is to reduce miner demand. That's their goal; this limitation is just a technical detail of implementing that. Hardware segmenting to serve different markets has been a thing forever and I don't see any reason to call this out as any worse.
That said, I like that Nvidia and AMD are taking different approaches here. That's free market capitalism, let the invisible hand guide the outcome.