Take a look
at my perspective, sitting in line 3 hours before the local Microcenter opens in blind hope that they have at least one RX 580 sitting on that shelf just inside. At first glance it seems pretty annoying to have to go to such lengths for some stinking silicon right? ,but at what point did it come to this? At what point did this market for a GPU become so desolate? So now that I've used up all of my rhetorical questions, we can begin to actually discuss this problem.
What is going on?
Well good question you may ask, in the more recent months, since March/April this year, Ethereum started to skyrocket, and to many it looked like a prodigal Bitcoin, so with its exponential increase of price was obviously caused by an increase of popularity. More people want to use the Ethereum network, thus the price and demand of Ether increases, and with this constant supply means increase in price. Same idea as Bitcoin right?
Wrong!
Well from the perspective of a miner such as myself, these two coins are vastly different and vastly valuable. Obviously it is no longer profitable to mine BTC with consumer grade graphics, but at one point in time it was and guess what, the smart ones among us bought them like wildfire. Until of course ASIC processors ran its course and destroyed that industry. The debate is ASIC vs consumer grade GPUs, for what is currently profitable to mine Ethereum? The latter choice is the clear winner, due to the DAG files which the Ethereum network uses. Thus this means that miners interests in the coin and accompanied price increase means extremely high demand for these cards.
Let this be known that this article isn't to rave about how great Ethereum is because even if it were some other alt-coin out there right now this shortage would still be unchanged. It's simple economics, high demand for the cards fueled by increase in prices of XXXX coin causes a shortage of supply as the supply stays constant but demand greatly rises, which means that I'm stuck in line at Microcenter. But is there an end to all of this?
Maybe yes, maybe no. First off a couple things would need to happen, either A. Ethereum switches entirely to POS and mining becomes obsolete or B. (the least palatable option) The Ethereum difficulty bomb. If you don't know what POS is then go google it, but necently the difficultly of the Etheruem network has been increasing exponentially, due to the new miners coming into the network. At some point the profitability of the coin will decrease so much that miners will move to other coins and, Ethereum will die out. But then will be replaced by another alt-coin like Zcash or Monero. And then we are back to square one, another coin, then more interest and then another GPU shortage. This may not be the end of the world though. Maybe by then people like AMD and Nvidia will get their head together and produce a business class GPU that miners can buy and then leave the gaming grade chips alone. I couldn't imagine being someone who is trying to build their first gaming computer and going to Amazon to see a RX 480 for $700 USD. This market is getting ridiculus and at somepoint it has to stop, either be it the GPUs running out or the coin changing, something will change soon. Good luck getting cards and don't stop mining!
If I missed something please let me know but I wanted this to get out there,