2) The latest earning from NVIDIA and AMD showed that about 30% of their GPU were to crypto miners, so no, the shortage was not an exaggeration and certainly not from many years ago.
The shortage was due to demand from people beyond mining wanting GPUs (including a new problem... scalpers) and there not being enough production. In effect, it was a manufactured shortage. There are a ton of articles that talk about all the aspects that went into the shortage and miners are definitely not the only reason. Easy scapegoat though...
Link #1 and #3 mention crypto as one of the causes of the shortage.
Like #2 is a statement by Nvidia who has a vested interest in lying, and has lied about the exact same issue so blatantly that they got fined by the SEC for it.
I just gave some random links I googled... feel free to keep digging, there are more that back me up.
You're wrong about scalpers too. They know the market... of course they know to prey on every opportunity.
Your 'evidence' is really nothing. That's a few thousand gpus... not that many, honestly. They are also not top of the line gpus... which gamers want to buy. older rx470 polaris class gpus are more than enough for large mining farms.
full disclosure: i'm a huge gpu miner, so i definitely have some experience in this area.
Then you have a vested interest in playing down the effect that this waste of energy bubble had/is.
> They are also not top of the line gpus... which gamers want to buy. older rx470 polaris class gpus are more than enough for large mining farms.
Way off the mark there, gamers not in the 1% don't buy top of the line GPU (as reflected in the Steam survey), they buy the budget to mid range price. When miners started buying GPU left and right in pallets, NVIDEA and AMD saw it and shift the manufacturing to the top of the line GPU where they have the highest margins even if the waffer would yield a lot less, because miners would buy them ASAP anyway. This reduced the amount of lower tier GPUs in the market.
Funny you mention the RX470, a GPU famously never in stock because of this dumb piramid scheme.
> Then you have a vested interest in playing down the effect that this waste of energy bubble had/is.
Nope, not at all. My business model doesn't depend on mining forever. I'm not playing down anything. I'm just saying that mining isn't the only reason (and at most 30% the reason) that GPUs were hard to find.
> Funny you mention the RX470, a GPU famously never in stock because of this dumb piramid scheme.
It came out 5 years ago and newer models replaced it.
>Scalpers buy up GPUs. There is less supply. That creates a problem.
Those GPUs are then sold immediately to real users. Scalpers do not increase demand.
Scalpers provide a service. They have automation or a way to buy stock fast at MSRP or closer to MSRP. Then they sell it to people who are willing to pay more in order to have the product now or avoid spending time to search for stock.
Scalpers cannot exist unless demand is greater than supply.
We are going to have to agree to disagree on this one. In the second link, it is in reference to tickets. At the end of the day, tickets are all the same. If you can't get the front row of the show, you'll accept something back a bit... because you want to see the show.
GPUs are different. Miners want specific brands and models and won't / can't accept anything else.
Still the same, the more GPUs are added to the network the harder it is to mine, the harder is to mine the more GPUs are added until it is no longer profitable, all this while drawing more power.
