PowerColor Graphics card Sales Cave in - sells 80% fewer video cards than previous month
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The Goose
I paid £450 for my Evga gtx 1080ftw with pretty much all the warranty intact after selling my gtx 1070ftw and only losing £15 off what i paid for it last year(£360)
RzrTrek
That's not a very nice thing to say...
D3M1G0D
And yet prices are still frustratingly high (at least in Canada). I guess retailers are trying to milk this cow as long as they can, LOL.
By that logic, we should also praise miners for helping to bring GPU prices back down :P.
But seriously, the root cause are the speculators and traders who bid up the price of crypto coins - a mining craze only happens when the price of cryptocurrencies shoots up. The skyrocketing price then causes miners to buy up GPUs, which in turn leads to retailers raising prices. Now that crypto prices have come down the mining craze has died off - in effect, the GPU market hinges on moneyed up speculators pushing the buy button on Bitcoin and other cryptos.
Kaarme
If you are truly looking for the root cause, it's the criminals. They are the only ones really needing crypto currency. Others can use it for limited purposes, but don't really need it. However, crime is a gazillion dollar global business of infinite variety, so there's no end of real money being pumped into crypto, making it all worth it.
easytomy
Why do I have the feeling that prices are still controlled by companies? (retailers or distributors or even AIB partners)
They might have tons of graphics cards in stock, but they prefer to sell 10% of them at 100$ over the MSRP, instead of 80% at MSRP (where the profits are minimal).
Embra
Retailers definitely control pricing. It's supply and demand. They card the GPUs at wholesale agreed upon prices.
They will sell them for whatever buyers are willing to pay. Sure we can blame miners. It is something that is hard to plan for for manufacturers (Nvidia/AMD.
D3M1G0D
Sorry, but I find this ludicrous. Criminals do not need cryptocurrencies (cash is still the most attractive option for criminal activity) and I seriously doubt that they are pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into cryptos, leading to a price spike and making headline news (this is the exact opposite of what you would want in a criminal enterprise). I mean, I just read today that the DOJ is launching an investigation into Bitcoin price manipulation. Criminals would want to avoid scrutiny by the government at all costs.
Those who promote cryptocurrencies value it because it is a potential alternative to the current banking system. If you are an opponent of fractional-reserve banking (like me) then you'd see cryptocurrencies as more than just a pump-and-dump scheme. The 2008 crisis showed just how fragile and volatile the current banking system is (without government bailouts the entire system would have collapsed) and I think it's important that we have a viable alternative / replacement. A decentralized ledger system (blockchain) is an amazing accomplishment in itself and well worth supporting.
vbetts
Moderator
Devils advocate here, but we purchase GPU's to play games because we want to...Isn't that greed too?
Noisiv
Welcome to the world of stock markets. Where everyone is just a gambler, and everything is speculative.
Lets be honest:
No one investing in the stocks of major publicly traded company is really-really all that interested in growing the company.
For all the average "investor" cares, the company can go to sh1t as long as he collects his reward. In my book that's a vulture, speculator at best.
And in case someone really thinks of himself as an investor:
Your $50,000 savings won't help anyone grow anything. Whether you "invest" them, smoke them, or decide to lie on them.
It won't make a dent in GOOG, AAPL, FB or any of S&P500 companies balance sheet.
That's really good to hear.
Because it means that the crime must be going down.
H83
I´m sorry but this is wrong. People are pumping huge amounts of money into Bitcoin because they want to make some easy money! With Bitcoins value being so high, everyone wanted a piece of the pie and started pouring money into it in the hope of making some easy money without any effort... And others started to buy GPUs to mine the damn thing. This lead to the crazy increase of value of Bitcoins. The same happened with other virtual coins. The current value of Bitcoin is 99% speculation and 1% the actual value... Not to mention that Bictoin is not an actual currency or anything remotely close to it.
So if you want an alternative to the actual monetary system, you have to look elsewhere...
Rich_Guy
RIP PowerColor.
-Tj-
@H83
Its both, easy money and good or the only logical alternative to e.g. central bank. Which is privately controlled, etc
Noisiv
Of course you have:
no real data
no actual means
not even theoretical means to gauge the degree of speculative vs real
and not only to gauge, but even to attempt to define which part is speculative and which the actual value
and not only for crypto, but for any medium of exchange
But hell if any of that is going to stop you, right?
vbetts
Moderator
Cool it down, let's not start any arguments now.
Fox2232
I can fix it for him and you too. it is not 99:1%.
Bitcoin has no value at all. Energy burned in creation of that thing puts it in red numbers.
It does not and likely will not fulfill its design target as long as there are places like coindesk which promote it as commodity of greed and fear instead of promoting it as tool meant for actual payment.
I know one crypto which has good chance to be successful.
And that's CryptoRuble, because conversion rate to regular money will be stable. (Killing greed and fear mechanics and allowing trade mechanics to take over.)
Blockchain potential is far from realized and I think it has great value and future, but those cryptos which are here today...
Edit: @vbetts Have not seen your post till I pressed The Button. 🙂
H83
I have the same means as you have to gauge the exact opposite... Funny how bitcoins work that we have extremely limited data to infer about it´s actual value or usefulness... Something that seems to indicate an "item" whose value is "created" by pure speculation... Because what we have in the end is a virtual coin that has almost no uses, isn´t recognised as currency or anything similar yet it´s worth an extreme amount of money. Do you have an explanation for this to happen other than speculation???
I now lot´s of people love the idea of a currency independent of any sort of government or central bank but bitcoin or similar virtual coins are not the answer. And there´s an high chance that there will never be a better option than the one that exists and we use right now.
Not to mention the fact that everyone can create a virtual currency system based on a blockchain system. Meaning that if you consider Bitcoins as actual currency, then the same can apply to all the other virtual currencies, meaning everyone can create money out of thin air...
Right now virtual coins are basically a playground for speculators trying to make money, nothing else. Maybe this will change in the future, something i really doubt.
Noisiv
Oh no. I am not claiming the OPPOSITE. See down:
For any currency, stock, bond, or for any other pure medium of exchange, there is no such thing as the actual, real, inherent and so on value.
Because you cant eat, plant or use it otherwise. So what other value or use is there, other than to exchange it. How would you even attempt to define "the actual value".
For all of these things, there is no other value than what others are willing to give you. BTC, or USD for that matter, has neither lower nor the upper limit. By itself, inherently, and so on, they are worth jack squat.
The clue is in "the medium of exchange".
D3M1G0D
The value of Bitcoin is based on how people perceive it. This is the way most things are valued - does gold have something special that makes it worth $1300 USD? No, it's just a shiny metal that we value because it's pretty. How about silver? Or diamonds? Some say rarity makes something valuable - but Bitcoin has a hard cap of 21 million (does this give it value?)
This is especially true of currency. What makes currencies like the USD or CAD valuable? Government decree. It's all based on the faith that the government will recognize it as money. Of course Bitcoin is not tied to any government, so its future as a currency will depend on how willing people are to use it in exchange for goods and services. For instance, I am willing to accept payment in Bitcoins 😉
Kaarme
If there's no crime, why would the DOJ care about crypto currency? If there are no criminals, why would the justice system waste time on it? The beginning of your paragraph says the idea of crime driving the crypto is ridiculous, the end of your paragraph says Department of Justice is studying the crypto. Uh huh.
When I say criminals, perhaps you thought I only meant drug dealers, illegal weapon trade, and such. I didn't. I meant both traditional and digital criminals. Like the funny guys who establish crypto exchanges, allow them to accumulate millions of dollars worth of crypto currency (assuming somebody would buy it with real money) and then one day the crypto exchange is mysteriously hacked and all the monies are gone. As if anyone with half a working brain wouldn't realise it was the very people who founded the bloody thing who also "robbed" it. But who's gonna prove it with all the crypto jazz? It's very nature makes it difficult to study as a crime scene.
It has been said by others already, but it's nothing but complete waste of electricity. CPUs and GPUs running at 100% for months producing absolutely nothing, only crunching algorithm whose only virtue is to be hard to compute for no reason whatsoever. Unless you use those computers as a really expensive electric heater in the house, it's utter nonsense. At the same time people are actually wondering how we can answer to all the power demand in the world when the nuclear industry is in trouble (just ask Toshiba) and the most pollutive coal energy is doing a dirty comeback. And then we have the bloody crypto miners spending more energy than the country of Ireland, wasting power for absolutely no intelligent reason. Well, at least renewables are getting somewhere.
jaggerwild
Yeah was gonna say power who? but I know in the UK or where ever they are a big seller, I don't think we even get them in the United States.
Bit coins have a by product too, the use energy to even produce them or what ever they do. Wasted energy that could have been used or donated for something other then greed.....
