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Comment by sasoon | Hacker News Reader

Maybe GPU prices will finally start to go down, especially after used 1080TIs flood the market

Only indirectly through Ethereum and other currencies. Bitcoin itself has not been mined with GPUs for a long time now.

That's ok, Ethereum is down to half of what it was a little over a week ago, Monero is also down to less than half of it's high price in the last month, etc. When Bitcoin has large swings up or down it tends to drag the whole crypto ecosystem with it.

Hopefully, as it seems to finally be pulling down the most popular GPU mineable coin, Ethereum:

https://www.coinbase.com/charts

Ethereum at $700 would have be crazy profitable 6-8 months ago, but it no longer is, due to increased difficulty. You might scrape a little profit there, but in June that would have represented ~$10 in profit a day on a 1080TI. Now it's maybe $2.

Will the difficulty adjust downward again?

As miners leave and hashing power goes down the difficulty will go down

You really don't want a used mining rig GPU, but yes, the prices will go down overall as the market gets flooded with used GPUs.

An open-air case running a GPU (sometimes undervolted) at a constant load versus a "gamer" GPU going through heat cycles (and sometimes overclocked)?

I'd take a mining rig GPU for a discount.

The biggest problem that mining GPUs tend to all suffer from is fan failure. I'm speaking from experience.

Replacing a video card's fan is certainly doable, but it isn't nearly as easy as replacing a CPU or case fan (due to the fact that so many GPUs have custom fan setups).

Excellent point, I had forgotten about this.

Some of the GPUs (like Sapphire's) have fans which are easier to replace. These are not the norm. Also, being easy to replace doesn't mean they are easy to acquire.

Maybe, maybe not. I've still got 2x machines running old 7950s which were mined with for over a year and they're running perfectly fine.

Gaming and general computing is such a low intensity activity - if they didn't break while they were mining I figure that they're comprehensively stress tested at this point and they'll run til they're too old to be useful.

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