Bitcoin Forum

http://www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2013/12/9/cryptocurrencies-are-causing-shortages-of-amd-radeon-gpus.aspx

Not sure this is likely the case, but interesting none the less.

My opinion is that this is deceptive advertisement. The Litecoin community, including its forum, has been pushing this idea for some time. The central thesis behind this is to raise awareness to Litecoin, so speculators can pour money into Litecoin.

The article itself seems to have been written by someone inside the Litecoin community or was heavily influenced by the Litecoin community. No standard article about computers and GPUs go to such lengths explaining a cryptocurrency.

Considering that it is Christmas season, and considering gaming is a big part of the computer sector, it is safe to say most GPU sales are about gaming. I don't doubt some are for Litecoin, but I suspect this is a secondary reason.

More hype than anything else.

i heard of this story too. its true. for me it was also hard to find some graphic cards some days/weeks ago...

but if you are interested in Litecoin-Mining, watch this:

http://www.coindesk.com/asic-miners-litecoin-soon/

This is a bunch of bullshit.

In the USA, its near the major holiday - and guess what, people shop. And guess what, inventories are low because this is the one time of year everyone has to buy something for somebody, or they buy it for themselves.

Correlation is not causation, you Litecoin try-hards.

I dunno, man. I'm looking at newegg:

280x/HD7950 either out of stock or no lower than $380

equivalent GTX760 in stock and $259 or $269

In my experience, a lot of people are biased towards Nvidia for gaming.

Last month, my nearby tigerdirect had a sale on sapphire 7950s for ~$200. And just after that, they had lots in stock. Last week I checked. There were none and I overheard an exchange between the manager and some customers. He told them people were buying them for "bitcoin mining" so they were out of stock to which the customer seemed surprised and stated "Isn't that not worth it anymore with GPUs?" I went over to the section where they were before and there were just a bunch of 760s, 770s, 780s and titans.

Look at the litecoin hashrate jump since mid-November and it seems to match up with this hypothesis, especially with the last 21% diff jump. Since Nov. 21st, the total hashrate for litecoin mining has gone up the equivalent of over 57,000 radeon 7970s or over 40,000 R9 290x's, heavily overclocked.

Now, time for some supposition and a break from facts. It really looks to me like litecoin is repeating the Bitcoin summer of 2011. I mined a bunch to immediately sell when litecoin was still CPU only. When the GPUs first rose way back then, I immediately gathered my remains and stopped selling (heh, if only I had kept them). I recently sold 1/4 of my holdings at 0.0316XBT but was surprised when it went as high as 0.05 before falling. I should stop underestimating speculators. I'm really curious as to what will happen, considering litcoin does not have the same support Bitcoin did back then and most places that accept litecoin do this in addition to bitcoin. Where will it level out? How will the upcoming ASICs affect this market where so many people are deluded by the idea that litecoin can't have a dedicated device built to mine it? The idea that that can't happen really makes absolutely no sense. Will it have it's own place? Or will it die? Will people realize their misnomers regarding the so-called advantages? Or will the crowd mentality grow such that the people using it aren't using it because of the so-called advantages?

There are severe ATI gpu shortages pretty much every year (has been a recurring news theme for a decade), though I only started noticing them when I started GPU mining BTC. There was a kinda-sorta shortage of high-end Nvidia cards last year.

I ended up paying quite a bit more than I wanted for some 270s due to waiting a couple days (I originally wanted 7850s, which were MUCH cheaper, but all the reasonably-priced ones went out of stock).

I believe this.  I've had at least 6 people call me in the past 2 weeks asking for help setting up Litecoin mining rigs, and all were asking if I knew any sources for AMD cards.  One even offered to buy my year-old 7970 for retail cost.

Also, the Litecoin difficulty has doubled in the last 2 weeks -
http://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/difficulty

just rumors  - Litecoin is dead  :P

If I would have to chose  the likeliest reason for this shortage, between Litecoin mining and X-mas , I would chose X-mas.

PCI-e riser is in high demand too, which indicates the cards are not being used for gaming. 

If the same shortage applies to nvidias then litecoin has probably nothing to do with that. But if nvidia's are still available for sale then mining might have something to do with it.
Also don't forget that an average gamer buys 1 gpu while an average miner buys a lot more.