"They reason that cards have a high residual value because they are being sold at a premium on eBay, so if mining becomes untenable they can always sell them on as graphics cards. But that premium only exists because of the alt currency mining industry."
Yes, but you're overestimating it... by a lot.
"A market flooded with cards that months ago were selling for thousands of pounds will see prices drop to barely hundreds of pounds. This will happen just as the card manufacturers have ramped up to meet the demands which saw graphics cards on back order."
No.
"Of course, mining is niche and gaming is mainstream: many more people buy graphics cards for gaming than mining, but it only needs a small percentage swing from miners buying cards to selling them to radically shift their value."
No.
"Just as the Hoover promotion saw people buying vacuum cleaners just for the free ticket to New York, flooding the second-hand market and sucking up sales from new ones, we can expect a similar period of hiatus for new graphics cards."
True to an extent, but no.
"In the longer term those graphics card manufacturers who survive the blood-bath will emerge stronger."
"Some will, no doubt, cash in on the alt-coins craze with dedicated hardware for script miners, but ultimately the benefit comes from the huge number of people who've learned ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) development as a result of the gold-rush. They are now used to an incredibly short time to market.
While a graphics card developer might expect it to take a few months to design a next generation GPU, and then several months from tape-out to packaged chips, the Bitcoin market has got all these stages down to weeks."
*Scrypt, and hahahahahahaha
"Bitcoin, and all the other alt-coins, is training a skillset for building password-cracking hardware that is both powerful and portable.The implications for the security industry are significant."
Reasonable.
"Expect password-encoding ASICs to become a norm."
No.
"If you are looking at buying graphics cards for mining you need to remember they will not have a resale value."
No.
"If you are a graphics card manufacturer, start working out how you would survive months of almost no sales."
No.
10% accurate article.
