The Astronomic Rise In Cryptocurrency Prices Will Extend The GPU Shortages With Miners Looking To Purchases All The Newest GPUs
The Astronomic Rise In Cryptocurrency Prices Will Extend The GPU Shortages With Miners Looking To Purchases All The Newest GPUs
Just yesterday, we saw one of the flashiest cryptocurrency mining rigs with plenty of RGB and 143 graphics cards. It was a rig featuring 70 GeForce RTX 3080 GPUs and 73 GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GPUs and is able to profit around $900 a day. Bitcoin and Ethereum have risen astronomically in price and so has the mining craze. On top of having the prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum skyrocket, we also are facing a current shortage of the latest silicon from Nvidia and AMD.
Before the rise in value, Bitcoin was stable at around $10,000, but in October the price of Bitcoin started to skyrocket and hit $20,000 in December. This past week, the price rose to close to $35,000 which is absolutely incredible. With the rise in the price of Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies have seen the same happen. Ethereum has seen a 500% rise in value since the beginning of 2020. At the start of 2020, Ethereum was priced around $200 and rose to $400 in August. In November, it continued to the upward trend in price hitting $600, and just this past week, it was priced over $1000.
Graphics cards were already very short in supply before this rise in cryptocurrency value, but now the demand is higher than ever for high-end graphics cards. The latest silicon from Nvidia and AMD was already short in supply with scalpers able to sell them for double the MSRP, but now to get the cards on release, you're going to be competing with miners, scalpers, bots, and other gamers. Upcoming cards like the RTX 3080 Ti will be even harder to get now after the rise in cryptocurrency prices.
The profit from mining at the current moment is incredible with every single GPU from the current generation has a break-even that is under 250 days assuming the prices of these cryptocurrencies remain stable.
Using the price of $0.10 per kWh for the purpose of calculations, the cryptocurrency profit is quite great. Tom's Hardware has done the calculations for the profitability of these cards, but one thing to note is that the break-even is calculated using the MSRP. At the current moment, getting a GPU at MSRP is nearly impossible, so the break-even for cards purchased above MSRP will be the purchase price divided by the daily profit.
Although CPU mining is possible, it is far from optimal. CPU mining has a higher cost involved with very little room for profit. In a mining rig, a person can run multiple GPUs on one CPU, but for CPU mining, that person needs multiple systems to mine with multiple CPUs. The most optimal way to mine is using a single of multiple GPUs. The most profitable people within the crypto mining scheme aren't the miners, but actually, the ones providing the miners with equipment.
The cryptocurrency mining craze has returned again, so the GPU shortage is set to continue until there is a drop in the price of cryptocurrencies. For all the gamers looking to get the latest graphics cards, now you have to compete with miners and bots for the upcoming releases. The AMD CPU shortage seems to be slowly coming to an end which is the only bright news about this situation at the moment.
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