Miners dump GPUs on eBay as value of cryptocurrency slides

We may be approaching the end of the mining craze that saw popular graphics cards from AMD and NVIDIA go out of stock, much to the chagrin of gamers everywhere. According to CoinDesk, which covers digital currency news, Ethereum’s value has taken a steep dive, which makes it far less lucrative for individuals to invest in multiple cards for a small mining operation.

In addition, Ethereum, one of the more popular cryptocurrencies alongside Bitcoin, is reportedly becoming more difficult to mine, so overall profitability has taken a huge hit.

Mining difficulty is often exploited to control the supply of digital currency and keep the time needed for block discovery constant. The increased difficulty for Ethereum means that more time is needed to discover new blocks, so miners get less return over time on their investment into these GPUs.

Ether is currently trading at around US$233, down from a high of over US$400 about a month ago. But as an illustration of how volatile it is, it fell to as low as US$133 over the weekend, and only regained some of its value in recent days.

The decreased incentive to stockpile GPUs and mine Ethereum has led miners to offload their cards on sites like eBay, which means that demand for new GPUs for mining has likely softened as well.

It has been near impossible to find cards like the AMD Radeon RX 580 and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 on sites like Newegg, and even if they were available, they retailed at crazy prices way above their original value.

There’s been a shortage of these cards locally as well, and its gamers who’ve suffered because of this mining rush.

But now that the initial high appears to be over, we’re hopeful that prices and inventories will stabilize and return to normal in the coming weeks.

Source: CoinDesk

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