Bitcoin has nothing to do with gpu prices going up, at least not anymore. Almost everyone has moved away from gpus since the arrival of ASIC's. The current demand for gpus is streaming from altcoins like Ethereum which use and algorithm that discourages Asic development. While the recent demand has waned the supply of cards, I feel it will only be temporary until AMD and Nvidia start releasing their mining specific cards.
Spot on. Seems they're working on some outdated research, but I suppose that's understandable with the rate at which things develop in cryptoland. GPUs are definitely still in use for some altcoins, but it's difficult to tell exactly what effect it might be having because there's a lot we don't know. How many people are going out to buy GPUs just for that specific purpose? In what quantity?
It is
kind of vague, but if you look at
Ethereum's hashrate over the last couple of months, you can sort of gather where a lot of those GPUs went.
Many more coins are in use which have mostly GPU mining as well. While Bitcoin
is huge with all the ASICs, there's a lot of money going into mining alts.
Or even if it is indeed solely that activity causing the shortage?
The crypto market it pretty unpredictable, so it's the only factor I could think of which would cause the shortage.
While there might be more to it, AMD and NVIDIA will be producing certain amounts of GPUs and expecting most of them to be used in the gaming niche, so when a whole new niche jumps on the scene with an incentive to just buy shitloads of their graphics cards, you can see the link there.
