Good news for video card prices perhaps?

[mxnerd]

No matter how you slice it, the cryptocurrency probably is biggest scam in history.

There is 0 intrinsic value of it.

Yeah, graphics cards price probably will go down since many people will stop mining using graphics cards. Huge numbers of used graphics cards probably will hit eBay.

 

[ub4ty]

With respect to negative replies to my post as there are too many to quote...
Everyone meet the new wall-street distributed ..

Oh and welcome back to 2008. Seems a remedial lesson was in order.

Second time's the charm I guess. Entropy is a mother #$*)1- especially when smoked in silicon pipes. Someone forget to mention not to inhale.

 

[tviceman]

The best thing would be for the government to ban cars. Internal combustion is a scam, the equivalent of driving around bombs. The horse and buggy is here to stay

Except that cars are physical, use resources that are diminishing and have value, takes human effort & skill to engineer, skill & effort to build, and has intrinsic value. Cryptocurrency is created by solving math problems with a computer. It's value is purely speculative, and as seen in the past few years, is being "created" over and over again with different names. Anyone without any real skill, effort, or added value to society can earn cryptocurrency.

 

[BFG10K]

Except that cars are physical, use resources that are diminishing and have value, takes human effort & skill to engineer, skill & effort to build, and has intrinsic value. Cryptocurrency is created by solving math problems with a computer. It's value is purely speculative, and as seen in the past few years, is being "created" over and over again with different names. Anyone without any real skill, effort, or added value to society can earn cryptocurrency.

Exactly right. Crypto-currency is just some anonymous dude that says "these numbers have $ value because I say they do!", numbers that exist within the scale of the nebulous vacuum that is infinity. Then the next random dude pops up and says a different set of numbers have value - rinse and repeat.

Ironically it's the sheeple falling for it that are the ones who give it actual value, because they trade hard currency for it. No different to religious scams that take peoples' money in exchange for "salvation". Meanwhile the charlatan con-men "founders" laugh all the way to the bank and will be long gone when their sand castle is washed away.

https://www.inc.com/linkedin/vivek-...-ponzi-scheme-human-history-vivek-wadhwa.html

The article describes it as a mirage, because that's exactly what it is. Do you want to buy water from my mirage oasis? It has value because I say it does.

Traditional currencies can certainly crash too, but the big difference is that they have the backing of governments and banks in the form of gold, bonds, shares, oil, property, etc. In otherwords, real things that actually exist, and often physical. But Crypto-currency is just a figment of someone's imagination with zero real backing.

 

[ravenish]

Many years ago a friend of mine and another guy I know answered a newspaper ad (that long ago) for a really cool sounding job. They went in and sat with a group of 6-8 other people in a small class type room. Turns out there weren't any jobs, but "an amazing opportunity" to get rich and be your own boss etc. etc. Other people in the room seemed really into it, kept saying things "that makes a lot of sense, but what about..." for which there was always an answer.

Eventually my friend and the guy decided this isn't for them and leave. Get to the parking lot and my friend realizes he left his umbrella. Goes back to the room and there is no presentation - everyone is just sitting around smoking and shooting the shit. They were all in on it.

I see the social media equivalent of this, pumping crypto on all kinds of forums and social media all the time. The difference with social media is that, just like with Russian trolls and the tea party, there are plenty of dupes who've bought into the scam hook line and sinker and will make the pitch for free. The Dutch were left with tulip bulbs, I guess at the end at least crypto suckers will have (heavily used) PCs to go online and demand the rest of us bail them out.

 

[Charlie22911]

Gold is a thing that has real value, until the economy goes down the toilet and the government makes owning gold illegal. I learned that was a thing last night.

Everything can be valuable until it’s not.

 

[pandemonium]

The whole point to crypto not having inherent value is exactly the point of it: it's meant to reflect the free market's value assigned to it, as the white paper for bitcoin respectable motives espouse. Absolute stability isn't something that will happen with a currency unless it's completely controlled by a perfect government in a perfect world. That's not going to happen any time soon, so expecting a country's fiat currency to be any better in a world economy is just as pointless.

Established > infancy. Currently. I think only a fool will expect it will stay like that forever. Holding onto the familiar is human nature, even when faced with something better than that familiar.

Don't let the market's corruption of investment degrade the motives for a global currency that's ever evolving. Time will tell if the experiment known as cryptocurrency passes the test of market adoption. For me, all I need to know is that huge investment firms and banking systems are investing pretty substantially into the technology. That's a giant, glaring fact that shouldn't be ignored and tells us the technology will likely survive, even if only in a bastardized version of the original.

Anyways, back [more] on topic.

I hope so. It's a disgusting thing that prices for consumer grade products are being so heavily affected by mining. Remember when DRAM prices went higher and higher? What did we blame for that, then and now? Was the market able to stabilize and put us at a new norm?

I can't imagine too many people net gaining that much at this point, so any newcomers to mining are likely turned away just by operating costs alone (even at the larger capital investment level). The market is saturated with miners and should correct itself, at least a little. The question is: when and how much? Will we be forced to settle into our new dawn or will another technology come along to help revitalize the consumer grade graphics card market for the end-user once again?

I'll end here with unsettling thoughts and say we may simply be looking at a new norm. Again, I hope not, but it is a possibility that should at least be entertained.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Gold is a thing that has real value, until the economy goes down the toilet and the government makes owning gold illegal. I learned that was a thing last night.

Everything can be valuable until it’s not.

The "real value" of gold is as much of an illusion as bitcoin. It's worth what people believe it's worth and its price fluctuates wildly. Gold has little intrinsic value, it's not special and its uses in industry can be replaced with other metals. If tastes changed and people stopped believing that gold jewelry was special or desirable the price would collapse and it would be no more valuable than copper.

 

[ghostrev]

Gold really has some uses:
- rings/necklaces and other jewlery
- used in some industries
- it is a metal and also a limited resource

Bitcoin is bits, like any other crypto. You can basically build an infinity of bits, worthless 0 and 1.

 

[Elixer]

No matter how you slice it, the cryptocurrency probably is biggest scam in history.

There is 0 intrinsic value of it.

Yeah, graphics cards price probably will go down since many people will stop mining using graphics cards. Huge numbers of used graphics cards probably will hit eBay.

or... they will just return them.

Frankly, this shouldn't be allowed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/7vmht1/and_the_returns_have_already_begun_one_person_and/

 

[IEC]

This should be explicitly disallowed by retailers. Abusing return policies is basically fraud.

 

[JDG1980]

Looks like I sold my RX 480 on eBay just in time. (Got a bit over $400 for it last week.)

 

[mxnerd]

or... they will just return them.

Frankly, this shouldn't be allowed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/7vmht1/and_the_returns_have_already_begun_one_person_and/

Some retailers will charge 15% restocking fees.

 

[96Firebird]

Looks like I sold my RX 480 on eBay just in time. (Got a bit over $400 for it last week.)

I just sold my last card tonight, a new 1070 for $670 on eBay. The profit from that and others almost paid for the 1080 Ti FTW3 that I'm keeping.

Now prices can tank.

 

[Shmee]

Guys, this is not the place to be discussing the merits or trading of Cryptocurrency. This forum is for things directly related to GPUs, such as games, mining/PoW on GPUs, and drivers.

 

[Guru]

Once one or two drop and drop hard, the rest of them will follow suit. The biggest and most known ones like BT and Etherium failing would mean pretty much most cryptocurrencies failing.

Personally no one would use them when you create them by wasting electricity and destroying your GPU/CPU for it, once the scam has been exposed. Even fiat currency which has been falling and is in a constant state of inflation still has value because of the link to time and work.

Also at the core level crypto is illogical, because what is stopping the richest people making their own crypto and buying all the graphics in the world and mining its own crypto and getting tens of billions in value?




You ignored a mod warning above your post NOT to talk about cryptocurrency
in the thread.


esquared
Anandtech Forum Director

 

[nitromullet]

I just sold my last card tonight, a new 1070 for $670 on eBay. The profit from that and others almost paid for the 1080 Ti FTW3 that I'm keeping.

Now prices can tank.

Yep, I'm with you on this. Sold my GTX 1070 for $750 last week. I wasn't planning on getting a replacement/upgrade for it until Volta launches, but I might just do it if I can find a decent card for $350ish.

I don't imagine we'll see the same type of deep discounts as we saw a few years back when crypto mining only impacted Radeons. With both NV and AMD cards being sold out/price gouged, there is a pent up demand that wasn't there last time. Anyone who wanted a gaming card back then just ignored the whole mining thing, and bought a GeForce card. As a result, people were really only willing to buy the post bubble used Radeons for deep discounts.

I picked up a R9 290 for $225 shipped from a HardOCP forum member. The MSPR of that card is the same as the GTX 1070 FE ($399), and I doubt we'll be seeing any 1070's prior to the Volta launch for much less than $350.

 

[nitromullet]

Looks like newegg has the RX 580 back in stock for $409.99 too.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131720

Wonder if these will sell out at this price...

 

[scannall]

I had planned on building a couple new machines this spring. But between ram and video card prices, that plan is dead. So here's to hoping the prices get back down to realistic levels again.

 

[richaron]

Woops, something something cryptocurrency redacted.

I'll just repost my thing from the other thing which is kinda relevant:

Meh. GPU mining and crypto's are still in their infancy, they will both settle down and equilibrate eventually. Whether mining dives or manufacturing increases or whatever. Now is obviously not at a point of equilibrium so suck it up and just don't by, or if you have to buy now then suck it up and pay (as I did with DDR4 this year).

I've been building my own boxes for ~20yrs now and I've literally waited years for the right product or price on monitors, SSDs, HDDs, CPUs, and GPUs for one reason or another. It happens. That's how the market works.

In this situation I think the constant supply and relatively short product update cycle on GPUs should help gamers over the next year or so.

 

[EXCellR8]

Thoroughly enjoying watching the crypto markets start to lose steam. The inevitable influx of used cards to the market might pose a sort of minefield dilemma, for those looking for used GPUs to game with them, but at least they should be reasonably priced again at some point. While I don't agree with retailers accepting returns, especially when someone walks in with a stack of used cards (clearly a miner), there's no way to really enforce or prove that the card was used for crypto... is there? Also, with the short supply of reference Vega and HBM2, it would be a waste to not at least recycle the gear--even though people are still buying the cards online for well over the original MSRP.

 

[wege12]

The amount of misinformation and uniformed people in this thread regarding cryptocurrencies and blockchain tech is downright painful. I assume this is how many critics sounded during the birth of the internet saying it was just a fad. Time will tell I suppose.

To anyone angry about inflated GPU prices, rest assured that any foward thinking cyrptocurrency looking to try and cement it's place in the future are actively moving away from GPU mining. Tons of cryptocurrencies can't even be mined. Ethereum GPU mining has in it's roadmap to do away with mining within the year.

 

[Despoiler]

Thoroughly enjoying watching the crypto markets start to lose steam. The inevitable influx of used cards to the market might pose a sort of minefield dilemma, for those looking for used GPUs to game with them, but at least they should be reasonably priced again at some point. While I don't agree with retailers accepting returns, especially when someone walks in with a stack of used cards (clearly a miner), there's no way to really enforce or prove that the card was used for crypto... is there? Also, with the short supply of reference Vega and HBM2, it would be a waste to not at least recycle the gear--even though people are still buying the cards online for well over the original MSRP.

What about the DOW taking the biggest one day point drop ever? Where are all the people making accusations of ponzi schemes, general scheming, oppression, and world domination by the elite?

 

[LTC8K6]

What about the DOW taking the biggest one day point drop ever? Where are all the people making accusations of ponzi schemes, general scheming, oppression, and world domination by the elite?

Point drop yes, but nowhere near the biggest drop.

 

[Mopetar]

Looks like newegg has the RX 580 back in stock for $409.99 too.

Let me know when they get back to MSRP. Normally at this time we should be seeing 580s going for close to $250 with some occasional deals dropping below that. The market is still nowhere close to normal at this point. It's funny to think that the best bet for getting a GPU at a reasonable price is going to be NVidia FE cards when Volta launches. Let that sink in for a few moments to consider how much things have been turned on their heads.

What about the DOW taking the biggest one day point drop ever? Where are all the people making accusations of ponzi schemes, general scheming, oppression, and world domination by the elite?

People are already doing that irrespective of what the DOW does. Also, you might want to look at a slightly longer history for the DOW. It's still up over the last quarter, and still way up over the last year. The drop seems like a healthy correction to me.