Seeing is believing, but it’s true: the RTX 30 and the RX 6000 they begin to lower their price, curiously pushed by a new drop in Ethereum. It has gone from figures that seemed to reach a 200% markup to more “interesting” (let out a laugh here) 177% and 167% respectively. Trend or effects of poorly planned speculation?
The problem of speculation and gamers
There is no doubt that seeing how the stock of graphics cards is increasing today where NVIDIA and AMD are striving along with TSMC and Samsung to fill the shelves, this fact does not directly affect the price of GPUs.
That is, does the stock increase and does the price increase? Well, we have experienced that paradox that was used as a double-edged sword on many occasions, and it had a part of truth, but it was not the problem. November marked a +183% in NVIDIA and +178% in AMD, December was increased to +187% and +183% and in January we are bordering on a drop of 10% in NVIDIA and 16% in AMD. Why are you wondering?
The explanation has nothing to do with the MSRP, nor the stock nor any factor added to these, although NVIDIA has raised the price of its Founders Edition graphics cards this weekend, but no, the only tangible reason to explain the increases and drops is the value of Ethereum or high-yielding cryptocurrencies. In other words, the value of the cards is purely speculative.
Inflation, Bitcoin and Ethereum
In the midst of the evolutionary process of inflation in half the world, with increases in interest rates on fixed income, they are making a terrible dent in highly volatile or speculative values. Bitcoin falls a 50% average In just a few days, Ethereum follows in its wake with the brutal fall almost nailed to that suffered by the best-known cryptocurrency.
Why is this happening? Well, largely because investors want to protect themselves from the inflation crisis and have withdrawn their money from cryptos to take refuge in safer and possibly profitable securities if this continues.
Therefore, one might think that at least 50% of the increase in graphics cards is associated with what was explained above about this speculation, but it does not work like that. The average miner assumes that when the coin goes down, they have to buy and expand the rigs to get more future profitability.
The problem is that in June Ethereum passes to the model of proof of stake and a fright of miners towards other cryptocurrencies is expected, if they have not already done so. Therefore, if the situation continues like this (everything indicates that it will, at least for a reasonable time), the value of graphics cards should fall little by little until reaching a lower cost.
In any case, it is ruled out that they reach their MSRP value, that is pure fantasy today and only a debacle would allow it, perhaps the fact that countries prohibit mining due to its energy costs and impact on CO2 footprint, which costs billions a year that governments do not want to pay so that others can get rich through pure speculation. Place your bets…
