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The RX 480 was an affordable way to do VR.

Most people doing ML either use Nvidia for Cuda or GCN based gpus for their compute.

Crypto is pretty much over by this point Look at all the cheap 4/580s on ebay.

Can you expand on what you mean by 'crypto is pretty much over'? I thought miners had simply moved to better cards to stay competitive resulting in said price drop of older cards?

Miners didn't move to better cards, they moved to ASICs. Once the currency is too hard for a consumer GPU to mine, miners move to specialized hardware which is far better at mining. When mining gets even harder, the only way it can be done profitably is to set up entire farms of chips that mine away, and that's a serious amount of cash at this point, far beyond a 1200 dollar card. By this point, mining is pretty much over for the rest of us mortals.

Which just goes to prove that the emperor is wearing no clothes: The vision of democratized crypto mining has not been realized. Instead of millions of people collectively holding the network in check, the mining power is being centralized by big key players. It's only a matter of time until the mining power has centralized enough to where the network can be sabotaged and taken over by whichever party is mining more than 50% of the work.

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