{"id":22353,"date":"2018-04-02T21:28:46","date_gmt":"2018-04-02T21:28:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ci027cfe79d00a2697"},"modified":"2018-04-02T21:28:46","modified_gmt":"2018-04-02T21:28:46","slug":"nvidia-ceo-cryptocurrency-here-stay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/business\/nvidia-ceo-cryptocurrency-here-stay","title":{"rendered":"NVIDIA CEO: \u201cCryptocurrency Is Here to Stay\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Speaking with Mad Money<\/em> host Jim Cramer, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang recently claimed that \u201ccryptocurrency is here to stay,\u201d and he \u201cdoesn\u2019t see the craze ending anytime soon.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though it first came to fruition in<\/a> 2008, bitcoin gained a solid taste of mainstream popularity in 2017 when its price began rising faster than anyone had anticipated. The year started with a single bitcoin trading at nearly<\/a> $1,000, though things ended on a higher note when the currency nearly<\/a> grazed the $20,000 mark.<\/p>\n

Since January 2018, bitcoin and other virtual currencies have experienced serious drops<\/a> in their prices, but Huang is convinced that cryptocurrency remains as popular as ever.<\/p>\n

\u201cCryptocurrency will be here,\u201d he stated in the interview while discussing the future of finance. \u201cThe ability for the world to have a very low-friction, low-cost way of exchanging value is going to be here for a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

NVIDIA is a technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Some of the enterprises\u2019 staple products are its graphics processing units or GPUs. These small processors, Huang explains, were some of the main reasons the company first decided to get involved in cryptocurrency last year.<\/p>\n

The GPUs have a powerful ability to mine virtual currencies, and blockchain technology requires computers that can be distributed \u201call over the world\u201d while remaining immutable and safe. Thus, Huang felt his company\u2019s products<\/a>could be greatly beneficial to cryptocurrency miners:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason why cryptocurrency became such a popular thing on top of our GPUs is our GPU system is the world\u2019s largest installed base of distributed supercomputing. Our processor serves as the perfect processor to enable this supercomputing capability to be distributed, and that\u2019s the reason why it\u2019s used.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interestingly, Huang noted that while the chips were no doubt powerful and crucial to the mining industry, he and his fellow executives are \u201cnot ready to move\u201d on this just yet. For the time being, NVIDIA is primarily involved in the gaming business, data centers and self-driving cars, and cryptocurrency and mining operations account for only small portions of the company\u2019s profits.<\/p>\n

In fact, NVIDIA currently has no alleged involvement<\/a> in Bitcoin, per Huang\u2019s comments at a recent GPU technology conference. He said its processors are predominantly used to mine ether, which accounted for roughly 6 percent of the company\u2019s GPU sales in 2017.<\/p>\n

\u201cEthereum \u2018ether\u2019 was designed as an algorithm to ensure no singular entity (or a few entities) has the power to control the ether,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was designed so that the algorithm requires the type of computing capabilities \u2014 the type of processing capabilities \u2014 that are made possible by GPUs in a distributed system. The GPU is popular with Ethereum because the GPU is the single largest distributed supercomputer in the world. It is the only supercomputer that is literally in everyone\u2019s hands, and no single entity can control the currency.\u201d<\/p>\n

He says that the influence of cryptocurrency isn\u2019t likely to affect how they do business in the present, though he\u2019s very confident this could change in the future:<\/p>\n

\u201cGaming is a much bigger business; data center is a much bigger business; our professional graphics is a much bigger business, and, of course, in the future, everything that moves will be autonomous, and we\u2019ll have autonomous capabilities, and that\u2019s going to be a much bigger market, but cryptocurrency gave it that extra bit of juice that caused all of our GPUs to be in such great demand.\u201d<\/p>\n