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Bitcoin hits $6,000 while mining peaks

by on24 October 2017


Crypto GPU market here to stay

AMD and Nvidia are heavily profitinging from the crypto market right now. Today, a few quarters into the whole Bitcoin and Ethereum, it looks like the cryptocurrencies are here to stay.

The fun part is that many people inside of AMD and Nvidia are not big fans of cryptocurrencies as this particular market is destroying a lot of gaming related sales. It is an understatement to say that gamers are frustrated. When available, the prices of the gaming cards are higher than the suggested etail prices. The reason is simple, there is still a shortage as the crypto guys are still buying the gaming graphics cards for mining.

Here comes the ugly part. Used cryptocurrency mining cards are more likely to fail and, in the end, a lot of these cards hit the second hand market. This potentially creates a lot of overhead with failed RMA cards and, of course, vendors don’t like it.

If you try to buy gaming cards for mining most distributors will only offer three months warranty-  a far cry from the standard year in the USA, or two years in most parts of Europe. There is an expression RTD (Run till Die) in the mining community, which is quite self-explanatory.

Generally, for some of the products, it takes a few months to pay off the investment and after that if the crypto miner sells the card even below the second hand value, one can still make profits out of it.

This is where an RMA can become a headache, as in the second hand market, it is next to impossible to know if the card was being used for mining.  

Crypto sales become so important that the question gets asked in financial conference calls for both Nvidia and AMD, and this sale is definitely responsible for most of the spiked GPU demand.

The cryptocurrency market is volatile and every day someone has an opinion whether this is good or bad. Ethereum jumped from $6.77 a year at its lowest to the $416.17 peak. Today it is selling at slightly over than $300 and can go either way.

Bitcoin advanced from $650 a year ago to over $6,000 a few days ago. At press time it is trading at $5,703.80 which is a dramatic rise compared to a year ago.

The crypto market is here to stay, and people will continue to buy GPUs to mine. Both Nvidia and AMD will profit from that.

Last modified on 24 October 2017
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