When will video cards become cheaper?

There are specialized machines for mining - ASICs, but in reality miners buy video cards becausewhich their cost is sometimes three times higher than the selling price. Why is this happening?

In 2016, one Ethereum cost $ 12, and the complexityproduction was approximately 1 Th / s. Rally of cryptocurrencies in 2017 and 2020 led to a surge of interest from both individual enthusiasts and large investment companies. The general interest in mining brought the difficulty of mining to 5 Ph / s, and the cost of the coin to $ 2000.

The increasing complexity of the Bitcoin network has led tothe logical result - miners switched to ASICs. But on the Ethereum network, it turned out that energy efficiency is higher when using video cards, and the best devices are in the greatest demand.

In the fall of 2020, NVIDIA introduced a new lineRTX 3000 with the top model 3090. The video card, with 10,496 CUDA cores and 24 GB of video memory, allows you to play in 8K resolution. The price was supposed to start at $1499 (112 thousand rubles), but it turned out that its computing power on the Ethereum network reaches 125 MH/s with 300–350 W of power consumption, and the payback period for the selling price occurs in 3-4 months. This circumstance led to a shortage of the video card, and its price - in the region of 300 thousand rubles. The problem persists, since even at this cost the payback is within a year, which by business standards is a good indicator.

NVIDIA went to meet gamers and releasedan update that slows down the operation of the video card during mining. However, miners have already learned how to bypass these restrictions. But the AMD leadership said that it will not put a spoke in the wheel of crypto-miners.

Chances are that video cards will get cheaper in the future,negligible. Even in the event of a cryptocurrency collapse, institutional investors will continue to mine for at least several years - such a loss is embedded in most business models. Just look at the financial performance of one of them, for example, Riot Blokchain. The company continued to increase capacity from quarter to quarter, despite persistent losses.

In the next two years, Ethereum will switch tothe protocol is proof-of-stake and cannot be mined. However, the market has more than 2,000 cryptocurrencies and, most likely, miners will simply switch to a less profitable coin, so the likelihood of maintaining a shortage and high prices for video cards remains high.

Analytical group StormGain