Ethereum is a strange little thing. When you open up your Blockfolio to look at how much you're valued right now, it can be as a fine bit of coffee in the morning, perking you up for the entire day, or a wrecking ball to your capitalist, speculative heart. However, even if you don't believe in the technology, there are many people who do believe: at least, in the future value of it. They believe it so much, really, that they're willing to rent entire airplanes to transport mining equipment (read graphics cards). And we're talking Boeing 747 here, not your average private jet (handy infographic on the pictures below, by the way.)

Ethereum's price fluctuations notwithstanding, which saw the currency soar from $10 at the beginning of the year to a historical high of $400 in mid-June, seems to have somehow settled around a $200 support level. At that value, it's still profitable to mine - even with the increased difficulty of the myriad of miners, dedicated or not, who have flooded towards the GPU-based workloads that support the cryptocurrency's POW (Proof of Work) design. And faith - or expectation of future value is so high, that mining conglomerates (the ones with the greatest running costs, but also pretty scalable profits - aren't willing to waste more idle time than they possibly can. Marco Streng, chief executive of Genesis Mining, told Quartz that "Time is critical, very critical. For example, we are renting entire airplanes, Boeing 747s, to ship on time. Anything else, like shipping by sea, loses so much opportunity."Some 36,000 units of Ethereum are collectively mined each day, which averages out to around $7.2 million worth of Ethereum per day. Even so, the recent Ethereum price drop scared many of the less heartened miners and investors out of the market (to which some might say "good riddance"). That has brought about a small flood of used graphics cards to the second hand market - no doubt marked as "lightly used." As such, the second-hand market prices remain somewhat at a premium, because even miners are selling their cards at the prices that were being practiced after they'd scooped up close to the entirety of the supply.

Even AMD has acknowledged the impact of mining on graphics cards shipments. This is something AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su touched on the impact of mining on graphics cards shipments and availability during a recent earnings call.

"Relative to cryptocurrency, we have seen some elevated demand," Dr. Su said. "But it's important to say we didn't have cryptocurrency in our forecast, and we're not looking at it as a long-term growth driver. But we'll certainly continue to watch the developments around the blockchain technologies as they go forwards." Dr. Su went on to say that inventories of GPUs are "quite lean" at the moment. AMD is "working on replenishing" stock, adding that the company's priority is on the gaming market. Although we have to say: there's virtually no guarantee new stock won't just be gobbled up by mining conglomerates as well. And we have a feeling (just a feeling, based on past experience) that Vega won't do much for the AMD card stock.