A week or two ago prior to the GeForce RTX 3060 launch, NVIDIA made it clear it would implement a hashrate limiter against cryptocurrency mining. That raised some questions and Nvidia explained it was BIOS and driver restricted.
As it now turns out, miners might have found a way to bypass the restriction, likely through a modified driver. If that is the case, then it bodes bad news for NVIDIA's upcoming products as well. On Twitter (iLeakVN), Chinese developers managed to bypass the restriction. Check out the below screenshot. You can see eight RTX 3060 graphics cards each reaching a hashrate of roughly 45 MH/s in the Dagger HashiMoto algorithm:
A Vietnamese Facebook group has also indicated that a modded driver exists which allows the RTX 3060 card to achieve a hashrate of ~50 MH/s.
Update: I need to make a side note here. As it turns out NVIDIA's protection specifically is aimed at Ethereum, it is very possible that we're simply looking at another cryptocurrency there, which could/would fall outside the protection.
Update 2: The crypto being mined likely is Conflux / Octopus, and not Etherium. The Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060's Etherium mining capacity still would sit around 25MH/s.
Update3: NVIDIA released a developer driver (GeForce 470.05), where the Ethereum hashrate limiter appears to be nonfunctional. Asia PC Watch reported about it, and it has now been confirmed that by using the GeForce 470.05 driver, the Ethereum hash rate limiter is not working. It was earlier claimed that by using a special BIOS and special driver the limit can easily be removed. If you download through her official channels, you need to register for a free developer account. As it turns out, it's an incompetent move from NVIDIA, the findings have been confirmed by several media.