Bitcoin Bloodbath Brings Cheer to Gamers as Graphics Card Prices Plummet

Bitcoin, along with most cryptocurrencies are going through a cycle of devaluation. They may rebound in the future, but for now it means that crypto miners will halt purchases of graphics cards, and possibly even sell what they have, to raise capital for next-generation GPU purchases (late-2022). What this means is a flooding of the market with used graphics cards, which will put tremendous pressure on graphics card manufacturers to lower prices. It’s also a means for NVIDIA and AMD to clear out their current-generation inventory, to make room for the next-gen. The inflection of all these factors brings cheer to PC gamers, who can finally have an NVIDIA “Ampere” or AMD RDNA2 graphics card at prices that are either at or below MSRP (launch prices).

Bitcoin has crashed nearly 60%, from its November 2021 price of 65,000 USD, to 27,150, as of this writing. This will have a direct impact on the economics of mining cryptocurrencies using power-hungry high-end graphics cards. Those with mining farms will look to stop mining, and possibly get rid of some of their graphics cards while their market-value are still at an acceptable level. The competition between pre-owned graphics cards and brand-new ones from the market, will bring down prices of both.

NVIDIA recently announced the “Restocked and Reloaded” marketing campaign, where the company is reaching out to gamers, telling them that their RTX 30-series cards are back in stock, at MSRP pricing. AMD, on the other hand, has refreshed its RX 6000 series product stack with three new SKUs, signaling gamers that it has new hardware on the shelves.

An AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT can be had for as low as $899, which is also the price for the cheapest NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080. The cheapest RTX 3060 Ti is $529, while the cheapest RX 6700 XT is $498. The cheapest RX 6600 XT is at $399, while the cheapest RTX 3060 is going for $419. Rejoice!