Miners sell GPUs via live auction
The crypto market is now in bear territory, which means that mining returns are nowhere near as good as they were in 2021 when everything was up and down. As profitability declines, miners are increasingly dumping their hardware on the second-hand market. If there are further losses, we could see some truly epic GPU dumps.
This is especially evident in China, where mining has been concentrated for years due to low electricity prices.Sellers flock to free fish (opens in new tab)– it’s kind of like eBay in China – and ditch a bunch of RTX 30 graphics cards you don’t need.
Twitter user I_Leak_VN (opens in new tab) A listing of RTX 3080 graphics cards has been released, priced as low as 3,500 yuan, or about $523. To put that in perspective, the RTX 3080’s US MSRP is $699, so that’s some discount. Is this just the beginning? If prices remain low, those prices are sure to fall further.
But that’s not all. Some miners have been holding live auctions to dump large numbers of cards. According to this post on Baidu (opens in new tab) (pass Tom’s Hardware (opens in new tab)), the RTX 3060 Ti has an auction price of between $300 and $350. Granted, some of them look as if they’ve been locked in a room their whole life with long-haired cats, but $300 is still a big drop compared to the pricing during the crypto boom and associated GPU shortage.
Even in Australia, I’ve seen dozens of GPUs listed for sale on local tech forums. One seller sold 19 RX 6700 XTs for AU$440 ($303) each.
Is this the start of a bigger GPU purge? Even though ethereum’s transition to proof-of-stake has been delayed several times, there are still miners willing to keep their rigs running in anticipation of a rise in ether’s price in the coming months. But as mergers loom and GPU mining is phased out, we can expect to see more graphics cards flood the used market. It looks like there are no lucrative PoW tokens to migrate to right now.
Here comes the GPU flood. Chinese miners and South Asian cafes are now dismantling their rigs and auctioning cards in live broadcasts. $300-350 for a 3060 Ti… pic.twitter.com/kphmIt7vZwJune 21, 2022
There are also upcoming next-gen GPUs, which will further drive down the price of RTX 30 cards.
Buying a card that’s been running 24/7 for months (or even years) can be risky, but if used prices continue to drop, a cheap card might be worth the gamble in the coming months.