Cryptocurrencies, and especially Ethereum, are a source of income at a “reasonable” cost that uses graphic cards as the main mining support. We are not going to count or waste time in emphasizing how this market has developed and how it has harmed the common user, but after the announcement by the developers about the change of this cryptocurrency towards a new mining model, the hopes came as water in the desert, but … Things they won’t be so simple.
Almost a month and a half ago we talked about the change that this cryptocurrency, the main driver of price and stock problems for gaming graphics cards, is going to experience in its proof-of-work model. This was planned from the beginning to the end of the year, so every player who has refused to pay the extra cost of more than 100% of the real value of a graphics card had his eyes on 2022. Well, we are sorry to tell you that everything is going to delay and by quite a bit.
“The Merge” is delayed, Ethereum will continue to be mined with GPU
The first change that Ethereum.org made with its hard fork has brought dire consequences for Ethereum-based assets, since approximately 2 billion dollars in cryptocurrencies were lost, but at the same time we have seen how the Hash has increased thanks to the NFT and recovered much of what was lost.
This means that they continue to buy and use GPUs to mine, so the catastrophe did not occur as such and the market has remained the same or even worse for the common gamer user. This was a disappointment as such, but hope was still alive by the end of this year. The problem is that according to reports today the so-called “The Merge” will not occur until at least the first half of 2022, which implies at least 8 more months of waiting for the market to begin to regularize little by little.
Overlap of architectures and prices
What is going to happen with this now confirmed scenario? Well, prices will either continue to rise or maintain the rate. The stock has returned to stores, so except for a specific model we have availability of models to buy, so this excuse for the price has volatilized.
The scenario is also daunting, because GPUs will continue to be sold at a gold price until the RTX 40 is almost on the market and with this there will be an overlap of architectures and prices, since then stores and manufacturers will have to lower them to be able to sell them. Unless NVIDIA breaks the balance by further increasing MSRPs and then it will be total catastrophe.
TSMC’s 5nm node isn’t cheap at all, wafers are through the roof (+-$ 20,000 and going up) so on GPU alone it’s going to be difficult to contain the expense without increasing prices. Will NVIDIA delay the launch? Will you force the fall with the new Ada LoveLace architecture? Complicated to predict, but what is certain is that we will maintain a situation similar to the current one for at least 7 or 8 more months.
