Bitcoin tombe sous la barre des 40 000 $, Fait espérer la disponibilité de la carte graphique

La crypto-monnaie la plus populaire par capitalisation boursière, Bitcoin, a chuté en dessous de la barre des 40 000 $ US, à $38,429 au moment d'écrire ces lignes. Cela équivaut à un énorme 43% drop in value from its November 2021 peak of roughly $67,600. Ethereum has also seen an 8% fall over the past 24 hours, as has the value of several other cryptocurrencies. While we won’t get into the nuts and bolts of Bitcoin volatility or hand out any financial advice, this could have an impact on graphics card availability owing to a multitude of reasons.

As of this writing, we see the GeForce RTX 3080 commanding a scalper price of roughly $1,500 (tout neuf), for the LHR variant (lower crypto-mining performance), while non-LHR cards that are used, start around $1,900. If the fall in cryptocurrencies continues, we could see increased availability of used graphics cards from crypto miners, as gamers would be willing to buy a used RTX 30-series or RX 6000 series graphics card that’s still within its warranty period (of 2 years).

Sales of used cards by miners will apply pressure on scalpers hording new cards to cut prices, more so as they’d be trying to sell newer batches of RTX 30-series cards that are LHR. Add to all this, the next-generation crypto-mining ASICs are on the anvil, including Bitmain’s Antminer S19 XP, and Intel’s “Mine Bonanza” ASIC that the company plans to unveil next month. The arrival of ASIC miners usually triggers an increase in the mining difficulty algorithm, which should worsen the performance/Dollar of GPUs in mining applications. The compound effect of all these, nous prédisons, could briefly improve graphics card availability in 1H-2022. A continued fall in the value of cryptocurrencies will only accelerate this.