So I take it you haven't tried to buy a 30-series GPU for gaming, then. It's impossible*, and that's because of mining*.
* Yeah, yeah, I know, supply chain this and pandemic demand that, but it's really mining that's the culprit.
* Yeah, yeah, I know, supply chain this and pandemic demand that, but it's really mining that's the culprit.
That's in Germany, we have some of the most expensive electricity in the world, and then the prices exploded since about 09/2021: Previously the cheapest offer was about 0.27€/kWh or maybe even 2c less if you're lucky; now we're at 0.35 to 0.45 for new contracts, depending on the region. I haven't checked the last few months (and especially not in the last week), but when I checked in early 12/2021 mining still netted some money (IIRC in the ballpark of 3 Euro/day/GPU).
If you think properly, it doesn't make sense to pay such a price just to kill some time playing games. A cheaper card would fit this purpose better.
Also I cannot blame the miners. If I am not missing something, currently a GPU mines cryptocurrency worth 50% of it cost per year (in countries with cheap electricity). I doubt you can get such percent in a bank deposit or other kind of investment.
By comparison, $1230 is over twice the MSRP of 2016's GTX 1080, which was a high end card at the time (and is roughly comparable spec-wise). It used to be that paying over $1000 for a graphics card got you the highest of the high end cards, not mid range stuff.
Obviously it's not just crypto miners raising this price. The chip shortage is real, there's been quite a bit of inflation since 2016, and PC gaming is more popular as it's ever been. But crypto miners are absolutely having an effect, and there's no real way to frame it as benefiting the average graphics card consumer.
Looks like you also missed that the chip shortage is affecting automobiles. Many articles exist that can explain better than I can about why this isn't a quickly resolved issue.
By design, proof of work requires even more resources as more resources are spent on it. One might say that it expands to consume all available supply.
Because of that, no matter how many cards Nvidia makes, crypto miners will want them all, as long as there is money to be made in crypto.
(the most prominent example is stolen electricity, but also for many miners it's a form of cash laundering. You always get less money out than you put in, but it's clean cash. In China's case they can't get money past capital controls, but you can mine at a loss and sell the bitcoins in a jurisdiction of your choice, that's worth something to them. Also, many miners are front-running exchange trades or extracting other forms of economic value.)
that essentially tells you that the price is about to go up or down, so you can make money on the movement.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/front-running-flash-bots-and-...
https://coinmarketcap.com/alexandria/glossary/miner-extracta...
Most of what you suggest doesn't benefit from having significant mining capacity yourself. (Though one thing does.)
It really is multi-modal market. And demand for that node, is different from automotive woes...
I feel like if Nvidia could, they would have scaled up. Why wouldn't they want to meet demand?
Cryptocurrencies give NVIDIA the perfect bullshit excuse that people won't ponder too hard over, because the story of modern media is simplistic... every story must have a "good guy" and a "bad guy". It has to be dumbed down for all the idiotic plebs like us.
Cards are still selling for significantly more than MSRP, so if this was the plan they're doing a terrible job of it.
There's plenty listed on sites like ebay or rakuten. It's definitely possible to buy. Else you can go buy it when it gets restocked somewhere else or go buy it at a physical store.
If you ignore the 90% to 200% mark up price from scalpers, sure.
> Else you can go buy it when it gets restocked somewhere else or go buy it at a physical store.
Ah yes, how to forget the mystic websites that have stock for more than 30 secs or the physical store that you don't need to line hours before and be in 10 telegram channels to know that.