NVIDIA Fined $5.5 Million Fine As it did not Disclose 2018 Crypto Revenue

A slap on the wrist...

 

That's chump change for them.

 

With 5.5mil fine... All they do is encourage em to do it again now 5.5 billion fine could have been effective.

 

NBminer fully unlocked LHR 100%. Strange that NVIDIA is silent and does not say anything. the whole world already knows it.

 

Only for gen 1 and not gen 2 LHR. Also like what would they say about it? Everyone said it would be cracked in a day and it took about a year to fully get around it. I think that's worth it.

 

The good point is that with energy that jump up due to sanction against Russia, nearly no one can farm in here, even with this unlock

 

That's what's called "opportunity costs" for managers.

 

Some crypto bro's are honestly spending this much money on new cars each month.

 

No cookie for you!

 

only 5.5milion, should have been 55milion minimum for that stunt.

 

Still don't get why Nvidia are being fined for this.

From what I understand they are being asked to guess what their product is being used for so investors can make a slightly more educated gamble?

 

Nvidia is a public company, so yes they have to disclosse every detail so investors can make more educated choises (you can call it gambles)

 

They are being fined because they mislead their own investors with false or incomplete information.

But like others said, this is simply a slap on the wrist, a very faint one...

 

I never really understood where they get these numbers from, and how exactly it's justified. Even though $5.5 million is just a slap on the wrist to Nvidia, that's also a massive chunk of change for not releasing a dozen numbers on a table, of which, Nvidia would not be able to report on with reasonable accuracy. Even though Nvidia sells mining-specific cards, they still don't know how many gaming units are used for crypto. It would have to be a rough estimate. You would be a fool to be invested in Nvidia and not know about the boon they see from crypto mining, so, it's plainly obvious that mining has made a big dent in their revenue.

So, while I don't really care about Nvidia's "loss", I don't feel it was entirely justified either. Perhaps there's more to this that I'm not understanding, but reading the phrasing from SEC just sounds like the government finding flimsy excuses to cash in on Nvidia's success.

 

So you invest in a cookie making company that makes a killing at the time because there are girl scout Olympics and their down time go from door to door selling cookies, when you ask the cookie company where all the sales come from they tell you is normal the people in the town buying the cookies like that always !... That will affect your decision to invest even more or keep your share ....by the law you are not allowed to lie to your investors.... Period !

 

If you read the full SEC report Nvidia knew that a larger chunk of it's sales were going to crypto then they were reporting. So it wasn't about Nvidia just guessing wrong, but they were intentionally misreporting it... whether it was maliciously or just incompetence who knows. Since that incident Nvidia has taken measures to work with it's vendor channels to improve reporting and presumably are doing their best to get accurate numbers to investors. So even though their estimates might still be off, they are at least attempting to distinguish sales channels, which is probably why the fine isn't bigger.

 

Not an excuse, though everyone with a brain knew the numbers were juked.

 

I read the article, unlike many posters it seems and the report. I still don't get why Nvidia has to report to investors that their "Gaming" products which were sold as pc gaming skus are being used for something other than gaming. Especially when they had dedicated cryptomining skus at the time.

Shouldn't they also report that a not insignificant percentage of their Gaming products are used instead of Professional products for engineering tasks as an example. My laptop's 2080 spends more time drawing and rotating squares in CAD or displaying my inbox than it ever has playing any game.

 

They have to report it because it's misleading to investors if Nvidia gaming sales double/triple/whatever and a huge chunk of that is not gaming, it's mining -- which is short term and Nvidia knows it's mining, which is the crux of the issue here (that nvidia knew internally that these cards were being used for mining but didn't disclose it). This is because investors think "oh gaming is doing really good and is much bigger than we previously thought, let's invest on this sector that's relatively stable and showing growth" when it could have been "well a huge chunk of these sales are being used for mining, and that's very volatile and could randomly go belly up, let's not invest" had Nvidia disclosed it.

CMP wasn't released at the time. I know they had weird specific cards throughout 2018 they released, P106's for example with no displays but idk if that was from Nvidia or partners just trying to cash in but this was from 2017-2018. There's also been articles released about this lawsuit that claims Nvidia has done a better job of tracking these sales through partners themselves.. which makes me think they didn't have a good grasp on it in 2017 anyway.

I think the number of people doing professional work on gaming cards is miniscule compared to the sales to miners during these mining booms - also it's a pretty consistent number... it's not like from one generation to a next the number of people using gaming cards to do professional work suddenly doubles or triple sales.