We all know the soar in popularity that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies like Etherium, Ripple and Litecoin have enjoyed the past year. This has attracted investors and miners. Due to this rising price and interest, graphic cards have also seen a rise in their price. This is because a range of mid and high-end graphics cards have been bought in bulk by miners creating stock shortages.
According to a report from Polygon, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1070 should cost around $380. However, some of these cards are being sold at more than $700 per piece due to the shortages. This is more than an 80% increase in price. These stacks of graphics cards are used by cryptocurrency miners to solve mathematical equations to authenticate payments and to create new bitcoin.
Since there are only a limited number of bitcoin and it is getting even harder to mine one so the computational power required is getting higher and higher. This has made it very hard for gamers to build a custom PC from scratch. Nvidia is advising the retail partners to prioritize gamers over miners but the retailers won’t say no to a big payday which they are more likely to get from the miners.
Some retailers have heeded the advice and are not selling in stock so the miners can’t get their hands on more than one. Micro Center even offering discounts to gamers who buy the cards alongside other components. Micro Center blames high demand from miners and constrained shipments from vendors for the industry-wide shortages.
The prices are not just affected in the US but all around the world and it is a trend that will keep on continuing. There is only one way to counter it and that is for the manufacturers to flood the market with so many graphics cards that they meet the demand of the users.