Last week John Loeffler of Tech Radar urged us not to buy a used graphics card right now under any circumstances. He argues that most of the used cards right now are from crypto miners and that these cards have been abused. Loeffler stated the graphics cards “have been rode hard and put away wet.” Due to the crypto bubble bursting, many miners are jumping ship and dumping their cards.
Don’t buy a Cheap Used GPU Right Now
I agree with John, the crypto miners lifted all the GPUs off the market, and scalpers took the rest. Now they want to dump all their burned-out trash onto us. Crypto mining forces a GPU to do a job it was never meant to do and do it all day, all night, over and over. Now they are expecting us to pay them back for doing us the favor of taking all the graphics cards in the first place. We know these cards don’t have a lot of life left. With the next generation of graphics cards on the way, even though there is no official announcement, leaker Kopite7kimi says the 4000 series could be here by July of this year,there is no reason to pick up someone’s old tired horse unless it’s a gift.
John tells us not to let them off the hook, that many crypto miners are still in their recouping phase and now desperate to get their money back by dumping all of the excess GPUs back onto the used market. Before I was all for getting a used GPU, I got my GTX 1080 used off of Amazon thankfully, before all this Crypto woo woo.
Crypto Miners Strike Back
I wasn’t originally planning on writing this article because it was already covered pretty well, but I changed my mind because I saw that yesterday, John added a follow-up. Now he is under attack from the Crypto mining community. Stand strong gamers and fight these crypto bullies. They can take our graphics cards, but they can’t make us buy them back from them.
Loeffler doubled down and told us “I meant what I said.” This brings joy to my heart, now we have the opportunity to punch back. For years now we have been taken for a ride unable to purchase GPUs at a reasonable price or at all because scalper bots can buy them faster than we can. Now it’s time to win #StandwithJohnLoeffler and take back what is rightfully ours.
I Would Wait
If you’ve come this far you already know my opinion on this. I don’t think we should do the crypto community any favors when it comes to this. Not only have they made it unprecedently hard to get an Ampure GPU it was even hard to get an older card. At one point GTX 1080s were selling for more than I paid for mine 6 years ago. Please don’t give them the satisfaction of winning again, the ball is in our court now and I suggest we keep it there.
There were memes going around about the RTX 3050 being a mythical creature because nobody could even get these entry-level cards. While its true that some miners probably took good care of their GPUs, others didn’t and I don’t even think that’s the point. The point is to not let bullies ruin the market and then pay them for their misgivings.
I for one am not going to be buying a used GPU this season, especially not an Ampure GPU. I don’t think any of us should. They built their bed and now they can lie in it.
Why We Shouldn’t Support Crypto Mining
It is bad for the environment and a glorified Ponzi scheme that whoever is left holding the bag at the end loses. Not to mention the other scams that inherently occur across the crypto community, that I talk about in my previous article Web 3, Crypto and NFTs. It adds to carbon emissions and uses a lot of electricity when doing proof of work. “As of 2022, the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) estimates that Bitcoin consumes 131 TWh annually, representing 0.29% of the world’s energy production and 0.59% of the world’s electricity production, ranking Bitcoin mining between Ukraine and Egypt in terms of electricity consumption.”
Not to mention crypto mining exacerbated the chip shortage amidst a global pandemic when demand for remote work was increasing. This led to not only GPU and CPU prices going up, but it also had a major impact on automobile manufacturers, thus making cars more expensive. Decentralizing finance is also a boon to criminal networks because transactions are much more difficult to track. I’m not saying the establishment is always right, but we do a lot of the things we do for good reason and cryptocurrencies throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Right now, there is a large surplus of GPUs hitting the used market and new GPUs are available again. The crypto miners are in a race to dump their GPU stores as Bitcoin and Ethereum continue to decline in value. The bad practices and the goading of the crypto community for the past couple of years have been in bad form and in bad faith. Now they expect us to bail them out by purchasing their used and abused GPUs. 
Best wishes
Chris C
Chris@techyeahs.com