Will Cryptocurrency Kill PC Gaming?

Going outside of the brewing here for a moment, I would like to talk about cryptocurrency in a context that really interests me: computer hardware.

So as I delve a little deeper into cryptocurrencies, I find myself reading more and more about crypto mining, and the impacts this is having in the PC industry as a whole. While Steem is a platform that does not seem to impact this industry, there are many currencies that are changing the market in a drastic way, and I want to find out why.

I'm a computer gamer myself, and my rig certainly has seen some millage. I'm sitting on an i7 2600k and a vanilla Radeon 7970, this was the PC to have back in 2012, but five years later, it was time to start planning upgrades. So I set myself the objective to upgrade my PC during the Christmas Holiday or early 2018, and set a budget of about $1000, but then I came to the daunting realization that this had happened:

But how can this possibly be??? How in the world can you go from a $399 MSRP to the atrocity of $1139 for a Mainstream graphics card?!

My entire budget for the upgrades would not even get me started under these conditions, so I had to postpone the upgrade indefinitely until the market re-adjusts to this insanity. I cannot say that I am entirely surprised at what happened though, as I read my hardware forums on a daily basis, I noticed that throughout 2017 this price spike was being foreshadowed, and that the world wide web was unanimous in who's fault it was: Crypto Miners.

I read this one particular blogger who was a miner from back in 2013 when the whole thing started, and he explained that he lost of lot of money back then due to lack of planning, but decided to go back into it just for fun now in 2018, with no specific profitability in mind. So he went about building his rig two GTX 1080s and cheapest possible secondary components, everything set him back $1600. He made extensive calculations about energy consumption and the rig's mining profitability, and given the current conditions, he estimated that it would earn him around $300 per month net of electricity costs. At first this didn't seem too impressive to me, it would take him over five months just to break even on his platform, and you can't really do much with just $300 a month. So why is this such a huge thing right now? Why are people shelling out 2k on an investment that will only break even six months later? It doesn't seem like a smart investment. But then as I researched around, and realized how deep the rabbit whole really goes:

From this...

To this...

To even this...

Well... I seem to have found the reason why graphics cards have tripled in price, and consequently also found out that my upgrade plans are utterly F@cked. That guy who's making $300 per 2 cards, seems in fact, to be making very good money, as these insane rigs will factor those profits by many times over, and churn dozens of thousands of dollars in crypto currency every month. But where do we go from here? Are gamers like me doomed to pay $1000 for an average graphics card? Has the entire market gone to the hands of the miners?

The industry has been slow to adapt, with the chip makers AMD and Nvidia seemingly powerless to change the scenario, as they cannot oblige their retailers to limit sales to miners, although they have suggested imposing purchase quotas per customer, and claimed that gamers are still their number one priority. It's just too bad that retailers give absolutely no shits about who is buying these cards, as they are swimming in massive profits from the surge in demand.

It seems that the PC industry is still waking up from this new reality of crypto mining and the boom in crypto currencies, but I see two scenarios likely happening:
1- Crypto mining currency bubble explodes, due to reasons? and the market for graphics cards will be flooded with used cards and drive the price of new cards to the ground (or at least back to MSRP); Or
2- New players will enter the market in order to fill the demand void, and the extra supply will drive prices back down to realistic levels.

This second scenario seems much more realistic, although the effects will be more slowly felt. However, some big chip makers are already moving some assets to get into the crypto mining market, most notably Intel, who hired the top engineer from AMD graphics division to spear head the development of their own discrete graphics products, a move surely influenced by the mining boom. https://www.anandtech.com/show/12017/intel-to-develop-discrete-gpus-hires-raja-koduri-as-chief-architect

In the end having more suppliers of graphics cards will be a good thing for everybody, miners and gamers alike, as nobody wants to pay $1000 for their cards, and the current scenario is simply unsustainable. I for one, look forward to more choices for when I upgrade, but in the mean time, I better save up a lot of Steem just in case I'm wrong and prices never down...

What do you guys think about Crypto Mining? Is that something you would get into completely or in parallel to Steem? I would love to hear your opinions on the subject.

Cheers!