Are Digital Miners Forcing GPU Prices to Increase?

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Gizmo
Not completely due to BitCoin miners, and prices are actually coming down some now. There's been a double-whammy: BitCoin was the first stroke, but RAM prices have spiked to 2-year high, and probably aren't going to significantly decline for another 6 months or so. Since video cards use a lot of VERY fast RAM, that has also had an impact.
 
Daniel~
Been twisting the old noodle about this...How could miners possibly effect the sales of hundreds of million CPU's? Are they so many are we so few?
 
Gizmo
Not CPUs Daniel, but GPUs. Miners buy video cards by the truckload, and are willing to pay a premium for them, thus driving up the prices.

Ultimately, though, this ends up hurting the GPU makers. When the miners are no longer able to turn a profit, they resell their hardware, flooding the marking and driving the price down below the cost to manufacture. Why spend money for a top-of-the-line 1180 when you can buy a 1080 for $200? (At least, that's what will likely happen when the market finally completely crashes.)
 
danrok
Daniel~ said:
Been twisting the old noodle about this...How could miners possibly effect the sales of hundreds of million CPU's? Are they so many are we so few?
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10,000 graphics cards mining crypto currency somewhere in Iceland:
gpus.jpg

That's just one place.
 
danrok
Gizmo said:
Not CPUs Daniel, but GPUs. Miners buy video cards by the truckload, and are willing to pay a premium for them, thus driving up the prices.

Ultimately, though, this ends up hurting the GPU makers. When the miners are no longer able to turn a profit, they resell their hardware, flooding the marking and driving the price down below the cost to manufacture. Why spend money for a top-of-the-line 1180 when you can buy a 1080 for $200? (At least, that's what will likely happen when the market finally completely crashes.)
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Not sure if they really sell the cards on? Not seen that myself.

If you have a big farm mining one type of coin, and that starts to become to hard for your GPUs you'd probably be inclined to switching them to mining some other coin that is easier to mine.

Seems they don't stop mining no matter what. If the exchange rate falls, they still carry on mining because they're speculating that the price will rise again at some point.

Because the ledgers and stats are there for all to see, its also possible to see exactly what the big players are mining at any given point in time. Many of them appear to be happy to have part of their farms mining coin which looks pretty worthless, instead of more valuable coin!
 
Daniel~
I hope they at least break even, The banks seem to not be liking all this alternative commerce. Reason enough for me to wish them well.
 
Daniel~
How long has it been since I built this box? My 670 GTX FTW costs today pretty close to what I paid what 4 years ago?

And shouln't they have asked me first? ":O}
 
Gizmo
danrok said:
Not sure if they really sell the cards on? Not seen that myself.
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It's not really happening much yet, but apparently it was serious issue after BC first became big and then crashed. 'Course, there weren't any (or at least not many) alternative crypto-currencies at the time, so there wasn't really any reason to hold on to the hardware; rather it made more sense to try to recoup some of your investment.
 
danrok
I built a cheap miner a few years back just for fun, to see how it all worked.

Spent about $100 on the hardware, and sold what little bitcoin I had mined for about $200 when the price was high. Not so bad, for something that I though was almost worthless.

Not all that sold on the idea in general, only because it is a huge waste of electricity.
 
Daniel~
Well you doubled your money and had a good time,and gained a fair understanding of bitcoin. Investments have gone far worse than that! ":O}

And WOW the electricity cost!!! I hadn't considered that.
 
danrok
That's why they build these mining setups in Iceland, free cooling and cheap renewable electricity.

But, I don't think Iceland can cope with anymore electrical demand.

Worldwide mining is consuming about the same amount of power as a small country.
 
Daniel~
This is quite a bit bigger than I realized. People are going to Iceland for the cheap geothermal juice and the free chill down...

That sounds pretty committed to me.

And so many are doing this Iceland is peaking out.

Sorry Danrock, I know I'm just repeating you, but I'm haveing trouble getting a hold on this...way bigger than I thought..
 
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