A couple of days ago, a very attractive piece of software for the cryptocurrency mining world appeared on GitHub. The name, "Nvidia RTX LHR v2 Unlocker", says it all for those in the industry, but for the uninitiated: it removes (or so it says) the performance limitation in Ethereum mining (called precisely LHR, or Lite Hash Rate), inserted by NVIDIA in its RTX 30 gaming video cards from 2021 onwards to prevent miners from continuing to buy them, leaving gamers to struggle with absolutely out-of-market prices and limited availability.
Only it turns out that the software is loaded with malware - and on top of that, of course, it doesn't do what it promises.
For the time being, no concrete illegal activity has been proven (e.g. spyware, data theft, ransomware, etc.), but the suspicions are too real to trust.
The Lite Hash Rate is technically a software feature, in the sense that it is implemented at the BIOS level of the video card. From a purely theoretical point of view, therefore, it is conceivable to find a way around it. Of course, Nvidia has no public documentation on how to handle the BIOS of its cards - it is an area the user should never interact with.
In the crypto world, there is a lot of interest in finding a way around Nvidia's limitation: the demand for cards without LHR is very high - and consequently their price on the secondary market. At this stage, therefore, LHR remains untouched - there are workarounds to limit its effects, but the mining performance compared to the same card without LHR remains significantly lower.
Written by: Joshua Wilson