Tests show $30,000 AI GPUs are terrible password crackers — RTX 5090 gaming GPU outperforms Nvidia H200 and AMD MI300X
Crafty AI tool caught repurposing its training GPUs for unauthorized crypto mining during testing
The protocol can extract a mining proof from genuine inference, as Together's endpoint does, but the rigs driving the rush run inference nobody requested or pays for, so the output goes nowhere. By Pearl's own research, computation is useful only if someone pays for the result, which makes most of the current mining AI-shaped proof-of-work.
Most of the mining activity has run on rented cloud capacity, with miners spinning up RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 instances on services such as RunPod and Vast.ai and pointing them at community mining pools. As that capacity flooded in, Pearl's network difficulty climbed steeply and cut the per-card payout, and hashrate.no now estimates the RTX 5090's daily revenue at $17.19, a 49% reduction compared to the previous $33.80 figure.
Pearl is a brand-new chain, and its block reward will only decline. It can also only be exchanged on minor exchanges where liquidity is thin, such as SafeTrade and MEXC. Officially, the Pearl pool is optimized for H100 and H200 cards, but as we’ve seen, community miners have produced builds that run on consumer-grade cards.
That split makes a repeat of previous crypto-rush GPU shortages unlikely, since the protocol is optimized for datacenter silicon and most of the rush has concerned rented cloud cards. With the reward set only to fall and the network's hashrate still climbing, returns are thinning in the same way past mining booms have unwound before .
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Key considerations
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cryptomining/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cryptomining/new-ai-compute-cryptocurrency-pearl-sparks-a-gpu-mining-rush-but-profitability-is-sliding#main
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