Game On

With the merge behind us, the energy required to power the Ethereum network is now only a fraction of what it used to be. But, for some, the most important benefit is still being decided.

• As Ethereum mining rose to popularity,  the high-powered graphics cards needed for mining became very hard to find.
• Miners were buying up graphics cards at such a competitive rate, it was virtually impossible to find any GPUs sold at MSRP from retail stores and sites like Best Buy. 
• This incredibly high demand gave rise to an entire secondary market dominated by bots, drastically inflating the price of hardware as they scalped new cards and sold them to consumers at much higher prices.
• After many months, prices are beginning to return much closer to baseline, according to some reports. Consumers in China can reportedly now expect to pay about $400 less for one of the most popular models (RTX 3080).

Despite the dip in the price of cards and the reduction in demand for high-powered GPUs used in Ethereum mining, some critics still believe that video cards will not become significantly cheaper any time soon. This is mostly due to the appearance of new proof-of-work projects continuing to pop up. 

The combination of supply chain shortages and crypto mining popularity may continue to impact prices for years to come, but for those of us looking to get our game on in the short term, some relief looks as if it could be on its way.