miners-are-dumping-gpus-via-livestreamed-auctions

The crypto market is now in bear market territory, which implies mining returns aren’t wherever close to nearly as good as they have been when all the things was on the up and up throughout 2021. As profitability drops, miners are more and more dumping their {hardware} onto the second hand market. If there are additional losses, its attainable we’ll see some actually epic GPU dumps.

It’s notably noticeable in China, where mining was concentrated for years because of low cost electrical energy. Sellers are flocking to Xianyu—which is a bit like a Chinese eBay— and flogging off piles of undesirable RTX 30 graphics playing cards.

Twitter consumer I_Leak_VN posted listings for RTX 3080 graphics playing cards which might be being offered for as little as 3,500 Yuan, or round US$523. To put that into perspective, the RRP of an RTX 3080 within the USA is $699, in order that’s some low cost. Is that simply the beginning although? if costs stay in a trough, these varieties of costs are certainly prone to fall additional.

But that’s not all. Some miners have been holding stay stream auctions with a purpose to dump massive numbers of playing cards. According to this put up on Baidu (through Tom’s Hardware), RTX 3060 Ti’s have been auctioned off within the $300 to $350 vary. Admittedly, a few of them appear like they spent their lives locked in rooms with chain smoking lengthy hair cats, however $300 continues to be a giant drop in comparison with how they have been priced in the course of the highs of the crypto increase and the correlated GPU scarcity.

Even right here in Australia, I’ve seen dozens of GPUs listed on the market in my native tech boards. One vendor offered 19 RX 6700 XT’s for AU$440 (US$303) every.

Is this the beginning of a fair bigger GPU purge? Though Ethereum’s move to Proof-of-Stake has been delayed a number of instances, there’ll nonetheless be miners keen to maintain rigs operating within the hope of an uptick within the worth of eth within the months forward. But because the merge attracts nearer and GPU mining will get phased out, we are able to count on to see much more playing cards flood the second-hand markets. It would not appear like there is a worthwhile PoW coin emigrate to without delay.

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There’s additionally the looming launch of subsequent technology GPUs which is able to depress the value of RTX 30 playing cards even additional.

It’s dangerous to purchase a card that’s been thrashed 24/7 for months, if not years, but when second hand costs proceed to fall, an affordable card could also be value a bet within the months forward.