Friday, January 21st 2022
Bitcoin Drops Below the $40,000-mark, Raises Hopes of Graphics Card Availability
The most popular cryptocurrency by market-cap, Bitcoin, has dropped in value to below the USD $40,000-mark, to $38,429 as of this writing. This amounts to a whopping 43% drop in value from its November 2021 peak of roughly $67,600. Ethereum has also seen an 8% fall over the past 24 hours, as has the value of several other cryptocurrencies. While we won't get into the nuts and bolts of Bitcoin volatility or hand out any financial advice, this could have an impact on graphics card availability owing to a multitude of reasons.
As of this writing, we see the GeForce RTX 3080 commanding a scalper price of roughly $1,500 (brand new), for the LHR variant (lower crypto-mining performance), while non-LHR cards that are used, start around $1,900. If the fall in cryptocurrencies continues, we could see increased availability of used graphics cards from crypto miners, as gamers would be willing to buy a used RTX 30-series or RX 6000 series graphics card that's still within its warranty period (of 2 years).
Sales of used cards by miners will apply pressure on scalpers hording new cards to cut prices, more so as they'd be trying to sell newer batches of RTX 30-series cards that are LHR. Add to all this, the next-generation crypto-mining ASICs are on the anvil, including Bitmain's Antminer S19 XP, and Intel's "Bonanza Mine" ASIC that the company plans to unveil next month. The arrival of ASIC miners usually triggers an increase in the mining difficulty algorithm, which should worsen the performance/Dollar of GPUs in mining applications. The compound effect of all these, we predict, could briefly improve graphics card availability in 1H-2022. A continued fall in the value of cryptocurrencies will only accelerate this.
Sources:
Google Finance, CNBC
As of this writing, we see the GeForce RTX 3080 commanding a scalper price of roughly $1,500 (brand new), for the LHR variant (lower crypto-mining performance), while non-LHR cards that are used, start around $1,900. If the fall in cryptocurrencies continues, we could see increased availability of used graphics cards from crypto miners, as gamers would be willing to buy a used RTX 30-series or RX 6000 series graphics card that's still within its warranty period (of 2 years).
110 Comments on Bitcoin Drops Below the $40,000-mark, Raises Hopes of Graphics Card Availability
As long as those shady overseas folk keep printing USDT and pretending it is a dollar, crypto coins will remain somewhat stable.
1. You cannot seriously believe that every miner is running a well-conditioned environment with AC on 24/7 (aka even higher power bills, especially considering the high heat output of many GPUs working together), this statement is objectively false and almost never the case: GPUs can take heat over time and electricity costs to keep a cryptocurrency farm air-conditioned far exceed the costs of replacing failing hardware itself; this is especially true when you are talking about small-time mining operations where one of those miserable crypto bros bought himself a rig with 12 RTX 3080s and thinks he's buying his way into the metaverse;
2. You cannot seriously believe that every miner is running a heavily optimized power curve; especially in large-scale operations as each individual graphics card's ASIC has its own power characteristics and it is simply impractical to develop custom BIOSes for each and every of them, especially when you are running 1000+ GPUs... Miners do not run Windows, which makes it doubly-difficult to manually test and batch assign each and every GPU to its optimal power curve. Additionally, power cycling the hardware not only is harmless but also occurs eventually even in high-uptime scenarios, servers must restart and receive maintenance periodically which is why failover clustering and backup systems exist;
3. Mining is an exceptionally intensive workload, placing a very high burden on the graphics card's power delivery system and - due to the aforementioned reasons - WILL cause heat damage to the hardware - even if running at an acceptable temperature, you're talking about 100,000+ hours at a constant 80°C+ heat load - goodbye caps, goodbye MOSFETs... memory ICs are particularly sensitive to the heat damage, if you get your hands on a known mined GPU and place it side by side with a new one you will see that there is clear heat damage surrounding the memory area, usually yellowed and sometimes, the plastic packaging surrounding the memory die itself will feel warped... in fact, the GPU ASIC itself is usually the only thing that survives and these have been finding their way into hardware recycling factories in China, resold through unlicensed OEMs that aren't listed in AMD's or NVIDIA's board partner list to unsuspecting customers as new GPUs.
A high profile example recently concerns Afox's RX 580s that have been dumped on third world markets, they are visibly recycled Polaris ASICs with *visible* heat damage (discolored substrate, yellowed epoxy) that are just removed from dead GPUs and reinstalled onto a new PCB. There was a huge commotion over it recently as Latin America's largest hardware channel got wind of it and exposed for everyone to see, at around 5:45 there is an example of what I mean:
It's akin to "okay I am going to buy this mildly used quote unquote high endurance MLC enterprise SSD! They will last a lifetime!" except they've already had PBs of data run through them and their SMART is almost about to trigger, but since it will end up on a Windows system that won't complain until the bitter end, it'll go unnoticed until the final outcome occurs... you know it, I know it, the scalpers know it and the miners know it. It's just average joe gamer that is lured in by the prospect of buying a GPU that has had 95% of its useful life run through at an "acceptable" cost - this is miners double dipping and laughing all the way home after dropping you this big fat 糞.
I could come up with more reasons for one not to buy a mined GPU but it would come down to the single old adage: a deal that is too good to be true most likely is; and that a fool and his money are soon parted.
I have an air-source heatpump to keep my home warm and heat my domestic hot water. The house sucks in fresh air from outside and a large (somewhat noisy) compressor in a utility closet takes the warm air from indoors, compressing it further to extract heat in a heat exhanger before exhausting it externally. It's not 100% efficient but every Watt of waste heat ejected by my mining rigs is being compressed and converted into maintaining the temperature of my domestic hot water tank to feed the radiators in each room and, primarily, heat the gallons of water we use to bathe and shower every day.
The alternative, without eth mining rigs is that the compressor has to run much harder, and much longer, with the additional burden of an 8KW immersion heater in the tank.
- Without ETH mining I spend electricity to heat water using mechanical compressors and electric heater elements in the hot water tank.
- With ETH mining I spend electricity to mine ETH and warm my home and then reclaim that heat for the hot water tank.
Either way the electricity is being converted to heat, but I choose to do it whilst also making a profit. If I scaled my rigs up beyond four I would have more heat than my home needs for winter and it's already partially wasted in Summer. My annual energy bill is about 40% higher than it was last year, so it's not a perfectly efficient system, but it was also a pretty energy-efficient home in the first place so a 40% increase on that is pretty negligible and I suspect a good chunk of that increase is because COVID-19 has meant that we're all in the home a lot more than we were previously.I don't want to think about it, but I really don't see it going any other way.
Last drops from all three stores, and that's only for 3080.