After the soar in popularity of craptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, ThatCoin, ThisCoin etc. people have taken to the extreme of foolishly dropping everything and trying to get in on the ponzi scheme which is craptocurrencies. From people selling their homes, to craptocurrency exchange companies running off with coins (sometimes multiple times under the same company name) and even pole dancers in Australia thinking that this is their rag to riches story – craptocurrency is now affecting innocent people of a community; the gaming community.
The community is up-in-arms about all these craptocurrency investing suckers, absolutely skyrocketing the price of GPUs through, past and beyond appropriate pricing. As the baseless hype continues to soar, so does the price of every mid to high end graphics card due to lack of retail stock because these craptocurrency monkeys are buying them in crazy numbers to build crap mining machines (just to lose it all within a few days). As if we already have issues trying to escape the dead horse bashing esque repetitive garbage that is being spewed on every cornerstone of the internet and even now, being taken into the real world – now if we want to relax and keep ourselves entertained, we have to splurge more just to play some games.
Polygon reports that both AMD and Nvidia’s range of GPUs are both skyrocketing in terms of price and retailers are trying (complete futile effort so far mind you) to take steps to give people buying GPUs for legitimate purposes a better chance of buying these “in-demand” cards before craptocurrency zombies snatch them (for their ponzi scheme cult). Polygon also gave an example that the suggested retail price for a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 should be around $380. This price however last year slowly rised to $450, and now to staggering amounts upward of $700. Yes you heard it right, amounts of almost double the retail price.
So what does this all mean? The end of affordable PC gaming just as it was starting? “No way!” shouted the optimistic minds on PC gaming forums, while pointing at the price of lower-end GPUs. “There is no way the price of these lower-end GPUs will go up, you need strong powerful cards to mind those valuable Bitcoins!” and so they lived happily ever after. Wrong. Well, I mean they were right for about a month – but then as supplies of the mid-high end GPUs really took a hit, the price of lower-end cards were creeping up. Slowly, slowly then boom. Craptocurrency miners need to have it all. The prices of the more affordable lower-end GPUs are now in the range of the old pricing for the higher-end GPUs. And as the moronic hype continues, so will issues like these. It starts off with just GPUs and it’ll only be a matter of time before these mindless miners start bringing up the price of other essentials to up their “cyber fortune”.
Nvidia was reported saying that retailers should take further measures to ensure that the sensible audience is the one that controls the stock of GPUs rather than those who will buy out whole stocks at once. I guess it’ll just be a waiting game to see if retailers respect their customer base or if it’s just a free for all.