Exiting news was cabled out over the wires this weekend. Finally the LHR lock was cracked. Who was the once to do it you ask. It was non other then the team at NiceHash. The company behind the QuickMiner software. Now finally graphics cards, GPU, with that Pesky LHR lock can mine Ethereum at 100% efficiency. Well the LHR v1, cards already could thanks to a Nvidea developer driver that found its way out on the web. But They rectified that pretty fast by removing the driver from developers and moving on to the new LHR v2. 

This new unlock so far only works in Windows however. Linux users still has to wait a little before it gets ported over to their OS. But as they say, the one who waits for something sweet, always waits to long. =) So if you want to save a lot of work and skip switching to Windows on all your mining rigs. You sadly have to wait patiently a little while longer.

Is everything now a dance on roses when it comes to Ethereum mining? Well sadly no. There is still some cards like the GeForce RTX 3050 and GeForce RTX 3080 12GB where Nvidea utilizes the LHR v3. And this sadly remains unaffected by the advancement that now lets us utilize 100% of cards with the older version of the LHR.

What do this entail for the prices of GPUs? Well they have been falling at a steady pace the last couple of months. But with this new unlock this might mean that the price of LHR cards might flatten out. Or start going back up again. Hopefully this will not effect the price of other GPUs.

And what about Nvidea, will this new workaround mean the deathblow for their LHR lock? It is hard to say. We are steadily moving closer and closer to the Ethereum merge, or move to ETH 2.0 if you will. And by the the LHR will be obsolete anyway. This could mean they very well could just scrap the entire thing. But knowing big companies, sadly I find this to be very unlikely. 

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