What more will the cryptocurrency boom take from us? Scalpers have single-handedly ruined the consumer electronics market for regular people who just have to game, work with graphics, create content, and earn their living. First, it was graphic cards and now it’s the hard drives and SSDs. All because of a new cryptocurrency that hasn’t even begun trading yet.
The news came in from reports from China last week. The reports said that there has been a sudden spike in the buying of hard drives and SSDs. It said that cryptocurrency miners were buying up stock to farm Chia. Chia is a cryptocurrency that is scheduled to start trading on May 3rd. While the situation is not as bad as Graphics cards, many regions have reported that hard drive prices have gone through the roof.
Seagate, a well-known hard drive manufacturer has even all but confirmed that it has seen a huge demand in its quarterly financial earnings. A Chinese news outlet “Time Finance” even went as far as to launch an investigation into the matter. They interviewed local hard drive dealers in the Chinese Silicon Valley i.e Zhongguancun.
They discovered that aside from the increased demand. A group of hoarders was also stockpiling hard drives to ‘drive’ up the pricing. Guess the only people happy in the pandemic are the scalpers and hoarders. With scalpers offering overpriced hard drives in WeChat groups and a number of merchants holding off on selling hard drives till the prices rose considerably. One merchant allegedly made 3 million yuan in a single day.
Chia doesn’t really require big hard drives, even 4TB will be enough for people who casually mine cryptocurrency. However, hardcore miners are gunning for the enterprise-level hard drives leading to anything above 6TB being sold out in China. Reporters even compared the prices of the 18TB and 16TB hard drives from last week and found that prices had increased by around 65%.
Chia has not even opened up for trading so no one even knows what the real value of a single Chia (XCH) coin will be. However, looking at the number of people planning to mine it, Chia may just go through a boom. The impact is only limited to Asian markets right now but no one knows when it will happen globally. Anything the scalpers and miners touch turns to gold, I mean it gets priced like gold.
What’s next? Maybe when a new cryptocurrency requires RAM, we’ll be seeing the same situation. Now I can’t even buy SSDs.