Question Will crypto mining permanently affect the price and availability of all future graphics cards?

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fordongreeman

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Will crpytocurrency mining permanently affect the price and availability of all graphics cards, now, and in the future?

The RTX 4000, 5000, 6000, and beyond, will be cost many thousands of dollars, and will be nearly impossible to purchase anywhere?

This sounds extremely cruel and unfair to people who need these devices for purposes other than mining electronic currency.

Also, how does using massive computing power to solve math problems constitute the generation of money?
 

Eximo

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Ooh, touchy subject.

To some extent, yes. Current miners are going after Etherium and then buying Bit Coin with it. Etherium is designed for GPU mining. Bit Coin has basically been ASICs since the last surge of mining.

However, the more people that mine, the more difficult the task becomes. At some point current cards will become un-profitable/un-desirable. Then there will be a glut of used cards on the market until the next major improvement in GPUs make it profitable again.

Value has been assigned to them and people are willing to pay for it, no other reason.

The computation basically creates blockchains. Which are mathematical puzzles that are difficult to replicate. Representing a distributed tracking system that is difficult to take down. Everyone saw a little effort input to extreme gains once it took off as a concept. It does have some value in that it is more secure (in some aspects) then standard currencies. But it also allows for all kinds of nefarious transactions...
 

Eximo

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'permanently'?
Crystal ball says ¯\(ツ)/¯ . But probably not.


Cryptocoins are "worth" what other people will pay for it. Or speculate on.
How does digging crystallized carbon out of the ground generate money?

Diamonds? Yeah, they are also a silly artificial market in gemstones, but they do have industrial purposes. They kind of get a minor pass from me. Though they can make artificial diamonds for the industrial purposes now, no idea if that is cheaper than mining them. I imagine so.
 

Phaaze88

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Agree: It was both the Mining Gold Rush and Covid combined that hurt.

That said, the mining thing is just another face of greed. As long as those blockchains have value associated with them, it will not die.
We(the people) gave them value. As they gain confidence from more and more of us to use mathematical, digital puzzles as a form of currency, it will become even more valuable... at least until they're all mined, anyways.
There's like 21-22M Bitcoins in total, and like 19M of them have been mined since last month. The difficulty in mining that last couple million is very high.
Heck if I know how many Ethereum, or other coins there are - I just know it's not infinite.
Someone will go out and create another one, people will mine and 'HODL' that one until the whole stock is mined up, rinse and repeat.

But yeah, greed.
There's nothing really stopping Bob - besides supply - with his current 5 gpu mining rig in his basement, from going out and 'acquiring' 5 more for another rig. 'Free money'.
Same deal for you or me really... though I went and used Nicehash calculator to give myself an idea of how much I'd make with my 1080Ti, and it just wasn't profitable. If I ran it all day, I'd make like 5USD.
I'm not running my only PC and gpu all day - overnight at most, so screw that.

I gave myself a headache looking at Reddit(go figure) with all that HODL to the moon nonsense.
This crap is no different from the stock market in that many are going to get burned.
It is a gambling game to HODL until the last coin is mined... then those who cash in at the right time = $$$$$. The masses? They get bent over, tied to a vaulting horse, and take it in all orifices with no lube, because the value will crash like nothing else, and there's no value associated with it anymore because there's none left to mine.
 
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fordongreeman

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Will the RTX 3000 series still be almost impossible to find and cost 3-5 times more than the MSRP in 2022?

Top-end CPU's from Intel and AMD used to be extremely difficult to find anywhere, and now you can find them on newegg and amazon for the MSRP.

I work from home as a 3D/VFX artist, and I want to get a hold of an RTX card because the program that I use (Blender) uses ray-tracing in cycles render, and there is a render option called Nvidia Optix, which uses the RTX ray-tracing cores, and makes rendering in cycles many times faster.
 
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Phaaze88

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Yes. This won't end anytime soon.
It's a huge storm consisting of:
A)Covid slowing supply.
Once the pandemic blows over, supply should pick up... whether it'll be enough to fizzle out both B & C will have to be seen.

B)Scalpers taking advantage of the demand.
Once supply picks up, this should die down, but if supply still can't keep up... well, the opportunists will still be at large.

C)Miners' limitless demand for gpus while the gold is aplenty.
This one is a wild card, and is dependent on the masses' confidence in blockchain as a currency.
If more and more people adopt the use of gpus to literally print money, the demand for more gpus is just going to go up.
Nothing's really stopping people who already have gpus from going out and 'acquiring' more, except for their own resources.
Even if the stocks crash, it likely won't be hard enough this time around. As of the time of this post, Bitcoin is right around 60K.
Do you have any idea how hard the market would have to crash on that kind of confidence?
 

carocuore

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Will the RTX 3000 series still be almost impossible to find and cost 3-5 times more than the MSRP in 2022?
Third world countries: Wait you guys weren't paying 5 times more??
A 3090 literally costs about 1.5 million in my country's meme currency, it's about $5000 , doesn't sounds like too much except for the part where the avg monthly income is about $200, yup, massive eek.
There goes my plan of getting a 3070 in the near future, at least I'm using what I have to mine and it's literally giving me more $/mo than my job, it sucks not having a 3070 but in the other hand mining is great for people playing life on nightmare difficulty.
 
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Karadjgne

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Define 'permanently'....

Historically, mining fluctuates. It gets hot and heavy for a minute when a new process is revealed and bits and coins are somewhat available. But as they get rarer or too much less valuable or harder to get, mining peters out.

And gpu prices settle down to closer to reality and reasonable value. Last time it was etherium, and amd Rx/R9 cards skyrocketed, this time it's nvidia 3000 that's king. Older cards are dissappearing because scalpers are buying everything in sight, taking advantage of need since 3000 cards are hard to get and covid/drought has reduced silicon manufacture and consequently supply of current gpu stock.

But it won't last forever, coins will eventually dwindle, nvidia will release 4000 series and scalpers will eventually get left with overstock they can't sell at a profit when production catches up to demand.

Serious pro miners don't use many gpus really, they use the accelerators like nvidia A100, that's a 40Gb or 80Gb vram card at $10k a pop. And nvidia has new mining cards, HX20 ( I think), that put a 3090 to shame.

This round of mining might last a while longer, but it will end eventually.
 
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fordongreeman

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Define 'permanently'....

Historically, mining fluctuates. It gets hot and heavy for a minute when a new process is revealed and bits and coins are somewhat available. But as they get rarer or too much less valuable or harder to get, mining peters out.

And gpu prices settle down to closer to reality and reasonable value. Last time it was etherium, and amd Rx/R9 cards skyrocketed, this time it's nvidia 3000 that's king. Older cards are dissappearing because scalpers are buying everything in sight, taking advantage of need since 3000 cards are hard to get and covid/drought has reduced silicon manufacture and consequently supply of current gpu stock.

But it won't last forever, coins will eventually dwindle, nvidia will release 4000 series and scalpers will eventually get left with overstock they can't sell at a profit when production catches up to demand.

Serious pro miners don't use many gpus really, they use the accelerators like nvidia A100, that's a 40Gb or 80Gb vram card at $10k a pop. And nvidia has new mining cards, HX20 ( I think), that put a 3090 to shame.

This round of mining might last a while longer, but it will end eventually.

When?

Will I have to wait for the RTX 4000?
 

InvalidError

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Permanently? Probably not. With all of the major chip manufacturers investing in 2-3 extra fabs each over the next 2-3 years, chip production should significantly increase, hopefully enough so catch up with the backlog that already existed prior to covid and the normal demand growth on top.

Unless something like governments cracking down on crypto-mining happens and crashes the market for good, mining will continue to gobble up all of the new GPUs it can and it'll be 2-3 years before the supply situation gets significantly better.

Supply of current-gen parts may also temporarily improve in the run-up to next-gen launches where miners will likely ramp down current-gen purchases in preparation for bulk-buys on next-gen.
 
It definitely was perfect storm. Where Covid induced home computer building and purchasing mixed with shipping bottlenecks (yes, also Covid), new GPU releasing, huge hype in end of 2020 due to ray tracing in Cyberpunk 2077 (IRL turned out the game is expensive buggy rubbish) and scalper botnets which grabbed out all available cards from market. Crypto pyramid scheme reborn and came only after that, but then took over. Then retailers realized that they can be legal scalpers too and grab money in spades. Now we have only scalped GPU prices everywhere. Even in craigslists - try to purchase used more or less usable used GPU (Nvidia GTX 960 and above or AMD R9 xxx and above) for less than doubled price. In reality GPU prices tripled.

What to do? Wait. New GPUs will not help - they will go away to cryptomining as usual. I expect no help for governments here, GPU selling pay taxes too. Apparently crypto bubble will burst again in one way or another. Wait for that and DON'T FEED SCALPERS. Nor private nor in retail. Do not buy GPUs for inflated prices. And help authorities to turn down scalpers in any possible way. Let they burn in Hell (or in prison, does not matter).
 

InvalidError

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if crypto crashes there will be a massive selloff and everyone will get gpus for msrp.
If there is another crash of similar magnitude as the last one, there will be plenty of used GPUs available at a fraction of MSRP. At one point, one could buy RX580s new-in-box for $120 and that even included one free game on top so if you were going to buy the bundled game at full retail anyway, the GPU's effective cost came down to $80 or less.

I wish I got one back then, I would have been able to sell it for 4-5X what I bought it for right now.
 

Pc6777

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If there is another crash of similar magnitude as the last one, there will be plenty of used GPUs available at a fraction of MSRP. At one point, one could buy RX580s new-in-box for $120 and that even included one free game on top so if you were going to buy the bundled game at full retail anyway, the GPU's effective cost came down to $80 or less.

I wish I got one back then, I would have been able to sell it for 4-5X what I bought it for right now.
crypto is a double edged sword for non miners, it makes the market suck sometimes but when it crashes its like chrismas morning with all the half msrp gpus on ebay.
 
Excluding secondhand market my guess is yes prices will be permanently impacted, I don’t see pricing coming back to what it was. NVidia and AMD have seen that gamers will pay more rather than go without. Most brands have raised their MSRP since the 3000 series first launched, I bet it doesn’t go down again when things improve and next gen seems unlikely to adjust downwards.
 

InvalidError

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NVidia and AMD have seen that gamers will pay more rather than go without.
Only because nothing else is available. When the market crashed last time around, AMD was giving RX570/580s away for nearly free and it took a year for stocks to run out.

Prices will come down when manufacturing catches up with demand, which will hopefully happen in 2023-2024 when everyone's new 3-7nm fabs come online.
 
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Only because nothing else is available. When the market crashed last time around, AMD was giving RX570/580s away for nearly free and it took a year for stocks to run out.

Prices will come down when manufacturing catches up with demand, which will hopefully happen in 2023-2024 when everyone's new 3-7nm fabs come online.
I’m not saying they won’t go down but I just don’t see them returning to 2020 Q3/Q4 pricing. That’s my guess anyway but only time will tell.
 

InvalidError

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I’m not saying they won’t go down but I just don’t see them returning to 2020 Q3/Q4 pricing. That’s my guess anyway but only time will tell.
I'm sure they will: lots of people don't want to pay $300+ (or even $200+ in my case) for a GPU and when AMD and Nvidia move their new GPUs to 5nm, they'll much prefer to continue selling their 7nm stock at a lesser profit for as long as there is still decent money to be made on 7nm parts than get no profit whatsoever from those people buying used instead.

It may take a while but it will happen.
 
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