Double and Triple Retail Costs for Video Cards. Why?

[Crusher]

The rising costs of performance Video Cards, both AMD and nVidia are not due to the manufacturers being greedy. It all has to do with the retailers being able to sell these cards at astronomical prices due to (supply and demand).

Cryptocurrency has been touted as the "next get rich scheme". Cryptocurrency miners buy dozens if not hundreds of video cards as soon as they are offered on the market. Retailers cannot keep up with the demand so they are pricing the video cards double and triple the MSRP.

There just aren't any new video cards in stock at any of your brick and mortar stores in your town nor are they available online for more than a couple of days. What use to sell for $350.00 is now selling for $700.00 brand new. Even used video cards are selling double the price of MSRP. An example of this is the going price of a 1070 FTW two years ago. You could buy one new for about $400.00. Now they sell new and used for $600.00 to $900.00 online at Amazon and Newegg. Crazy, crazy.

No one knows when the frenzy will switch from video cards to a new type of hardware to mine cryptocurreny but in the meantime, it's hurting PC gamers by putting GPU/s out of their price range.

IMHO. The Cryptocurrency frenzy is just as shady as MLM was in the 1980's.

A good read for what is used to mine cryptocurrency.
https://www.bitcoinmining.com/bitcoin-mining-hardware/

Visit YouTube and type in their search field "how to mine cryptocurrency". You will see rooms filled with video cards and devices knows utilizing ASIC* (and a couple other new technologies appearing on the scene)


*An ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) is a microchip designed for a special application, such as a particular kind of transmission protocol or a hand-held computer. You might contrast it with general integrated circuits, such as the microprocessor and the random access memory chips in your PC.


All over the world their are huge rooms filled with hundreds of Video Cards. China has the largest ATM but many other countries have personal or corporate enterprises that are snatching up thousands of video cards every month. So much so, that Video Card manufacturers are months behind trying to keep up with the demand.

Hopefully the futurists who believe in "no banks no real currency" will develop new technology that DOES NOT involve VIDEO CARDS. Even the manufactures, though get a huge spike in sales and profits over the past three years want to see this stopped. They want the cards to be sold for what they were intended, not this current insanity happening around the world.