CRYPTO MINERS VS GAMERS – COMPETITION FOR NVIDIA GPUs

For the past year and a half, there has been a war for gaming graphics cards amongst PC Gamers and Crypto Miners. These two sides are battling it out for every Nvidia graphics card that is manufactured. Crypto Miners are, of course, looking at it from an economic standpoint while PC gamers want the graphics cards for gaming purposes. In a sense, it’s a battle between art and profits; the art side is losing very badly. 

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Crypto Miners have been making hefty profits from their business and are reinvesting on more graphics cards. Gamers are left looking for scraps, making do with older generation graphics cards that aren’t capable of running their favorite games at the highest capacity.

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It’s not really fun for PC gamers at the moment; acquiring graphics cards has become a near impossible task. Crypto miners are buying them in bulk, leaving few left for gamers. The problem with the current situation is that there has been a massive shortage of semiconductors.  Botting has been creating more issues for PC gamers as time passes, as the gaming graphics cards are instantly sold out as soon as the stock is replenished. They are then sold at overpriced rates by retailers, such as the $699 RTX 3080 being sold for over $2000. 

https://www.techspot.com/news/91324-nvidia-amd-gpu-prices-headed-back-stratosphere-availability.html

 

Crypto miners don’t really care about this extreme spike in pricing, as they can afford it, or have to afford it due to their business. Gaming graphics cards are known to have an extreme amount of processing power, as well as computing power, making them the prime candidates for great crypto mining. This is essentially their livelihood. Gamers on the other hand, are struggling to find any good Nvidia GPUs at normal price rates due to an unnecessary increase in pricing and a shortage of stock.

The main motivator for Crypto miners and their war for acquiring so many graphics cards is Nvidia’s cards being well suited for mining Ethereum. Ethereum is the main currency that is being mined, along with Bitcoin. Since November of 2020, Ethereum has seen a huge increase in price, almost tripling. This has made mining cryptocurrency much more profitable for miners, increasing the incentive to acquire cards. 

 

 

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The battle for graphics cards will keep on waging as long as the prices for certain cryptocurrencies keep rising.  In 2018, when the prices for a certain cryptocurrency dropped, miners ended up selling their stock and hurting Nvidia’s business significantly. For gamers, there is hope that PC gamers will eventually get their hands on the powerful graphics cards they all want, but for the time being, it is almost impossible to find a decent GPU in the market.