Almost a year on from our look into why than their manufacturer suggested retail pricing (MSRP), it’s happening again in much more dramatic fashion. Availability, and the ever-present fluctuations of supply and demand, are the cause, but this time demand has skyrocketed because of graphics card-powered. It’s been years since graphics cards were used en masse for Bitcoin mining, because the hardware arms race meant that specialized application-specific integrated chip (ASIC) mining hardware quickly overtook them.

I am looking to buy a new graphic card to mine dogecoins, i currently have a 7750 but only getting 130 kh/s at max, i am looking for something slightly better.

Ethereum mining, however, as with other digital currencies, doesn’t benefit in the same way from specialized hardware, so graphics cards are a great solution for mining them, and that’s leading to stock shortages and price hikes. On Friday, Nvidia stated that it was, however, and requested that retailers take action to ensure the needs of gamers were met before cryptocurrency miners. “For NVIDIA, gamers come first,” the company wrote in a comment to. “All activities related to our GeForce product line are targeted at our main audience. To ensure that GeForce gamers continue to have good GeForce graphics card availability in the current situation, we recommend that our trading partners make the appropriate arrangements to meet gamers’ needs as usual.” How high have prices gone?

The once-humble Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 retailed as low as $200 back in April 2017. As of January 2018 however, it’s not uncommon to see the GTX 1060 hit prices anywhere from. The GTX 1080 Ti, meanwhile, has a retail price of $700. That’s inflated to at least $1,000 on Newegg, with most cards going between $1,200 and $1,400.

Amazon does no better. We couldn’t find any cards with stock direct from Amazon.com. Most listings, provided by third-party stores, were well above $1,000.

AMD’s cards have been hit just as badly. The once-inexpensive AMD Radeon graphics cards have seen their prices, culminating in stock problems around the world. Those show no signs of abating, though we may have finally reached a point where people aren’t willing to pay three times the MSRP for them. Vega 56 and 64 cards, like Nvidia’s GTX 1080 Ti, regularly sell above $1,000. The company made an effort to curtail the issue with bundles that include a Vega video card with several other components, targeting them as gaming system builders, but the bundles sold out and the promotion has since ended. It’s not clear what can solve this problem. Even bundle are a poor solution due to the high prices of cards.

Scalpers could still make a tidy profit buying bundles, then re-selling the cards and other hardware individually. Purchase limits have already appeared on some stores, but don’t to solve the issue. Again, due to high prices, scalpers swoop in on any available stock and quickly buy it out.

Getting around a one-purchase-per-household rule isn’t hard for committed video card flippers. Why Do You Mine ZenCash ZEN. Rumor has it that both AMD and Nvidia are working on which would ship with a slightly lower price tag and no video connectors.

That would make them useless for running a gaming PC, but perfect for mining rigs, and could help keep prices down on standard GPUs. That may finally present an option that has some impact on pricing, but few such cards have appeared so far. For now, gamers can do little but stare at cryptocurrency prices and hope for a pause in their ascent —. Dampened enthusiasm for mining may all that could stop the current supply and price problems. Updated 1/22/2018 to reflect current pricing.

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page.. The era of Bitcoin mining on the GPU is dead. A year ago, a single Radeon graphics card could crank out a reasonable fraction of a Bitcoin in a single day. Today, that same GPU earns a thousandth of a Bitcoin in 24 hours, generating little value while consuming a substantial amount of power. The shift to ASICs for mining mirrors the shift from CPUs to GPUs, but the market isn’t content to just turn those mining rigs off — not when there’s an alternative currency available for which ASIC miners do not exist. That alternative is Litecoin — and there’s reason to think that buyers have emptied the shelves of AMD’s Radeon hardware to build mining platforms.

First off, there’s the fact that you can’t find a high-end Radeon in stock at the moment. Newegg and Amazon are both out of stock, while over at Amazon, the lowly AMD Sempron 145 — a single-core, 2.8GHz chip with a $29.75 price — is the. Litecoin, like Bitcoin, is a cryptocurrency, but it’s based on scrypt, not SHA-256. Scrypt is a different cryptographic algorithm that’s purposefully designed to be difficult to parallelize. While that hasn’t stopped it from moving to the GPU, it requires far more memory than Bitcoin mining — several gigabytes worth, as opposed to several dozen megabytes.

Litecoin confirms transactions faster (every 2.5 minutes, rather than every 10 minutes for Bitcoin) and it contains more coins — 84 million coins will be found in total under the LTC protocol, as opposed to 21 million for BTC. Bitcoin and Litecoin prices tend to move together; Bitcoins stratospheric leap over the past month (it’s down from a high of $1200 but trading at $873 as of this writing) has created an odd situation where it’s easier to mine Litecoin and then convert LTC to BTC then it is to just mine BTC to start with. Nvidia users may also take note — the gap between Nvidia and AMD cards in Litecoin mining is slightly smaller than with Bitcoin, with the GTX 770 capable of up to 240 KHash/s (yes, we’re back to KHash, from MHash) as compared to about 880 KHash/s for the R9 290X. That’s still a significant gap, but it’s better where the 680 hit just 130 MHash compared to the R9 290X’s 874MHash/s. Should you mine Litecoins? My philosophy on mining cryptocurrencies hasn’t changed since I first heard about Bitcoin in 2011. If you want to make a bit of a play at earning a little scratch, go for it.

Definitely go for it if you already own the hardware. If you think mining some coins could help defray the costs of buying a new GPU that you’re going to use anyway, then that’s probably a reasonable bet. Understand, however, the.

In the two years I’ve been mining, I’ve gone through three pools. One became too small to sustain itself, one was DDOS’d to death, and 50BTC technically claims to still be operating, but its account system has been screwed up for nearly two months and the support staff no longer answer emails.

Its FAQ on the attack hasn’t been updated in weeks. All withdrawals are frozen. Jumping into this scene, therefore, isn’t something I recommend doing on a lark, and I definitely don’t recommend investing thousands in building huge server farms to try and cash in on Litecoin. Yes, if you mined hundreds of Bitcoins between 2011 and the present day, you may have just settled your retirement — but the chances of predicting an essentially unpredictable market Don’t risk money you can’t afford to lose. A tip of the hat to reader at Seeking Alpha, who alerted me to the sudden Radeon shortage and the LTC shift. Due to there being no central authority to create the currency and distribute it fairly in doing so, mining tries to solve this by giving work (complex puzzles) to the miner applications. If they solve the puzzle, they’re rewarded with a ‘block’ of new coin (currently 25 bitcoin on the bitcoin network, or 50 litecoin on the litecoin network).

It’s actually quite interesting and a little complicated, as the solution has to meet certain criteria, such as difficulty (solution has to include x number of leading zeros as determined by the network’s current hash rate — this is to maintain the pre-determined speed at which the currency is created), it has to include the correct information from the previous block in the blockchain (complete transaction record that everyone on the network has access to — this helps secure the network against fraudulent transactions), and the transaction of the reward itself, etc. A block can actually be more than the amount it’s set to be from the get-go (ex 50 LTC), as users can give ‘tips’ to the network in order to give their transactions priority (so they confirm faster) — these tips are hidden in future blocks, and helps ensure that there will always be a reason for miners to keep mining, for if they stop, the network ceases to function/exist.

Also, if a transaction is too large, there’s a required fee to send it. Lets say you receive 1000 x 0.001 BTC, then try to send the 1 BTC somewhere, that’s a large transaction due to the source of funds literally taking up so much space/data in the blockchain) So over time, as new blocks become smaller (as pre-determined by design), if the value of what’s being mined isn’t keeping up with the cost to mine it (ex. Power usage), then theoretically, the team of developers will have to raise the fee for transactions to ensure that mining stays profitable.

So, a few problems with what you said. I use my computer for gaming. I use it to create writing, which I publish. My writing is not a material thing. It does not exist in physical form unless someone prints it. Is it useful?

If it’s useful, then things that are digital and have no tangible quality can be useful. That includes cryptocurrencies.

All currencies or methods of exchange contain value. It doesn’t matter if the “currency” is salt, or paper money, or diamonds, or gold, or something we think of as a commodity, like water. In the desert, water is priceless. If you can turn Bitcoins into real money, then Bitcoins by definition have value. Ditto for Litecoin, ditto for words on a screen. All of these things are defined as valuable because they can be exchanged for a different more popular form of currency. They have value because markets of people decide they have value.

Right now, one Bitcoin is worth about $870. Just to expand on the idea of value, it’s we, the people, that give anything value. Money is debt (ie. Borrowed into circulation), businesses (corporations) can only create debt — it’s the people who service that debt and give corporations, money (IOU’s), etc. So if you think about it, it’s no surprise that people value bitcoin / litecoin so highly compared to the dollar — it’s not borrowed into circulation like our fiat currencies, nothing is owed for the existence of a bitcoin or litecoin, and it’s not just created all willy-nilly — it’s finite, and work has to be done for it to come into existence. This is why I believe in crypto currencies, it helps our society move away from our flawed monies, towards something that has a positive value. Paying debt with debt only results in more debt.

Think about how you might pay your debts without using debt money. I’ve never heard of this Ellen Brown. Is money not borrowed into circulation? Doesn’t that make it debt? If you use money to pay for something, aren’t you then using debt money to pay debt?

I’ll take a look to see if I can find Brown’s stuff, and take a look at anti-Brown stuff to see if I can see the logic in it, but everything that I’ve read, including the bills of exchange act here in Canada, affirms the theory that money is debt. If the country (In my case Canada) as a whole wasn’t in debt, and our currencies were still based on something real, like the gold standard, then sure, money would have a positive value. But so long as it’s borrowed into circulation (and ultimately owed back out, or being paid for somehow), I would consider this debt. You’re conflating the creation of money and the operation of a fiat currency, though I can’t speak to the particulars of the Canadian system.

Governments raise money in two ways: Taxation and bond sales. When the government sells a bond at 1.5% interest over 10 years, yes, it’s raising the debt. But that’s fundamentally different from saying money = debt. There are advantages and disadvantages to the use of fiat currency. The simplest to understand is this: When the supply of money is tied to the supply of gold in a country, the economy cannot grow faster than the rate of expansion of the gold supply. Monetary policy cannot be used to stabilize a country in the event of a sudden economic downturn, and economists generally believe that this is a vital means of helping to mitigate such problems. I can’t speak to Canada’s specific problem, but the US national debt gets a lot of discussion.

Here’s the thing. We pay off the interest on the national debt using tax revenue, and we do that in the first three weeks of the year.

So the idea that we borrow money to fund our previous spending just isn’t true.We borrow money to allow future spending. Okay fine what about nickels or dimes or bills or any kind of currency. They all take energy to manufacture, it takes more energy to make a penny then it does to mine one. And pennies don’t really have any uses outside of being used as currency.

Bitcoin or litecoin are the same, the energy isn’t going to waste, it’s just being converted into currency. Not to mention the hardware used to generate litecoins has a use. GPU’s can be used for gaming and other computer tasks, which is better than a printing press that can only print money and doesn’t have any other uses. “but the gold itself still has a valuable characteristics.

It could still be used in science, products and medical apparatus. Even if the value completely collapsed it could still be used in electronics.” – so what? Previous trends put gold value in such a height, that technology of it’s use (from neck chains to fighter plane switch contacts), basically use such small amounts of it, so it’s worthless! I once read, that upon opinion of some researchers the minimum price of the helium balloon, sold at any fair, should be valuated at least 260 bux, based on it’s rareness in the nature in the pure form (now it’s actually a sub-product of natural gas extraction), but we can buy it for a couple of dollars and all it does, it lifts itself in the air (well, that’s a use). It’s all the same in crypto-currencies business – valuate it, or believe it’s worthless (though current trends puts it into environment, where you get actual deposit of any other kind for it) – at the current moment – You can get services or goods for it, and just the share fact, that it supports anonymous transactions puts it above any other regulated means of value exchange.

“China banned all coins.” Uhwhat? China disallowed banks from transacting in Bitcoin. They said that people were free to use it, they just wouldn’t let banks conduct business using it or offer services around it.

As for the difficultyit’s going to continue going up, that’s what it does. Telling people not to bother mining sounds like a miner who doesn’t want his cut being eroded by other minersbut the fact is, the more miners that come on board with Litecoin, the stronger its position will become as a valid and usable currency. Its success depends on the strength of the network of miners. Plus, right now there are no ASIC miners for Litecoin and Scrypt reportedly does not respond well to ASIC, so the arms race that hit Bitcoin won’t hit Litecoin as hard. There will be FPGA boards out to reduce the energy consumption, but it won’t do what ASIC has done and remove mining from the reach of the individual. They banned banks yea, but what’s to stop them from banning it at stores too? The average person wont commit so much effort to open a wallet.

Through the bank is easier for the layman. ‘Investors’ are not wide-spread adoption. Difficulty going up correlates to value going up, but correlation is not causation.

Value is based on the market. Difficulty is based on hashrate. They’re not related. Saying value goes up when difficulty going up is what miners say to feel more comfortable with the declining prospects. I found this after doing my calculations. A difficulty of 22k in early 2014. Do you guys see the value going above $50 by then (or $40)?

Mining and holding doesnt cause the value to go up either if people are hoarding it (hoping the value will increase) instead of using it. If the value stays ~$35, expect it to be unprofitable around Jan/Feb (22k difficulty). More rigs will be coming online once their 280x orders arrives. I’m basing all this on the assumption of no ASIC/FPGA already. No need to mention that.

Factor in FPGA and it becomes more grim for GPU miners. They shut down QQ coins and came down hard on electronic currency, however their reaction to Bitcoin has been FAR more acceptingprobably because it is not centrally-controlled. They have said that Chinese citizens are free to use it and trade in it, as long as they’re aware of the risks associated with it right now. That is a FAR cry from their reaction to QQ and so I’d say it’s a very good sign that they are accepting it. The central bank’s primary objection to Bitcoin is its current volatility, which is why they don’t feel it meets the requirement of being currency in the true sense of the word (and they’ve said as much). However, in 10 years that volatility will have virtually disappeared as Bitcoin proliferates among the populace.and it will likely satisfy everyone’s definition of currency. When the benefits of transacting in Bitcoin become well known to the public, people most definitely WILL gravitate toward itand the developers of wallet software and services related to Bitcoin will make it ever easier and more user-friendly.

I’m not worried about adoption – it’s not a question of “if” but “how fast.” Litecoin can and probably will piggy-back on Bitcoin, because the two are so similar and Litecoin is so well-suited to transaction volume, where Bitcoin isn’t. The difficulty going up influences price but not directly. In fact, supply doesn’t really have that much influence right now, because the whole unit can be subdivided so many decimal places. Right now, Litecoin and Bitcoin are undergoing a price discovery process via early adoption and that’s liable to continue for quite a whilebut it isn’t influenced as heavily by how much computing power was required to create the latest influx of Litecoin. The buyers of Litecoin don’t know or care, by and large.

In fact right now, Litecoin trades pretty much in lockstep with Bitcoin, but people aren’t sure what to value it at yetbecause it isn’t as well-supported by third party app development, yet. As soon as Mt. Gox starts trading it, that will most certainly change. The introduction of FPGA only gives people more hashing power for the same power consumption. It is not the gigantic leap in hashing power that ASIC represents. There are Bitcoin rigs that will do TERAhashes, even the best FPGA boards in development will only do 4 GIGAhashesthat’s a gigantic discrepancy and it means the hashing power of the network will not scale as rapidly or violently as Bitcoin has.

The nice thing about Litecoin is, because it is resistant to becoming an ASIC arms race (thus far), everyone will be in the same boat when it comes to hashrate as the difficulty rises. Also, mining is not for everybody. It requires a level of technical expertise that the majority of people do not have, even if they wanted to get into it. They’ll burn out motherboards and fail to find the right clock speeds to maximize their mining, then give up. Only the dedicated will succeed and that is probably as it should be.

When has the governments ever accepted things when they cant control it? The Internet is open. That’s why NSA is a huge deal with its invasion of privacy. That’s why almost all the governments around the world are passing some form of law that allows spying on individuals and restricting access to the Internet. How Long Does It Take To Mine A Ethereum ETH 2018.

Once it get big enough, they’ll restrict it somehow (eg. The Great Firewall). The bright future of crypto assumes the government will do nothing, while the market runs its course.

That will never ever happen. Governments will strive to protect their own sovereignty first. They wouldnt be able to control inflation rates, economy, exchange rates, etc by supporting crypto.

The life of crypto is in the government’s hands. Hence the value of the crypto is in the government’s hands.

With the difficult constantly increasing, it’s basically the stock exchange. People blindly believe they’ll break-even in a month and start making profit after that dont factor in the increasing difficulty and randomness of its value. At least with stocks you can somewhat predict what’ll happen by researching the company. Crypto (right now) is gambling. Any sane person will say that one should assume they’ll lose all their money in a casino.

If you cant get a rig running now, assume no profit. Unless you guys see all the nations band together like EU is in Europe Yes. Adoption rates will be slow. Difficulty will constantly increase. No profit by early 2014.

Taking your more optimistic vision, the new miners now would most likely hoard the coins to make a profit or sell asap to minimize losses. If they sell asap, no profit by early 2014. If they hold, they pray the government wont kill it before they sell. Thanks for the FPGA/ASIC lesson, but how does that actually encourage new miners to start? All it does it put a deadline on the profitability of GPU mining. Charlie- but how do governments ban a peer to peer currency anyway? I mean they can stop financial institutions and/or service providers from trading in crypto, but all it takes is a wallet on your private PC or smartphone to be back up and running again.

My understanding of these decentralised currencies is that the main objective is to take away the power from governments precisely so they can’t manipulate them in the same manner as they do with their fiat currencies. On a slightly parallel note, governments have been attempting to legislate peer to peer piracy and the effectiveness has been pretty limited. Its the same sort of idea- government can come out and say “We are shutting down BTC or LTC” but there is no central server or issuer to shut down per say. They would have to shut down every individual miner and server that is contributing towards the maintenance of the blockchain which is hopelessly impractical and impossible. The only way I can think of would be to shut down the internet but that would also cripple almost every sector including the governments themselves.

I recently came across an article about the Germans attempting to do just that- legislate Bitcoin by ‘Taxing any capital gains’ on it and they are finding it nigh on impossible to implement their suggested legislation. They dont have to ban the currency. They just ban all transactions of the currency like China did. There’s more than one ways to kill it. Would the ban end up causing more wide-spread adoption?

But for a currency that has no backing of any governing body, it’s gambling and playing the stock market. People dont see that so that’s why there’s so much hype around it. It’s a bubble at best, sell the rig and coins before it pops.

Crypto taking power away from governments is a double-edged sword. Regulation keeps things in check. The good and the bad. For a society to function, there needs to be some regulation. Is currency one of them? Maybe, maybe not. Anyone and everyone will agree that the government will try anything and everything they can to prevent that control from being taken away.

The article that you’ve read is proof of that process. It failed, but it’ll be back under a different bill with slight modifications. That’s basically how all government does things, persist with slight tweaks under a different name until it goes through. Governments don’t have to eradicate virtual currencies completely. All they have to do is take away the means of exchanging them for real currencies, something that can be very easily done. Let’s face it, the recent price increases are not due to wider adoption, but rather speculative activity by people looking to make a quick buck. The vast majority of these people are not interested in actually using BTC/LTC and care nothing for all the philosophical arguments.

Crypto would be worthless to them without a means of conversion to real currencies. Once the bank-exchange relationship is broken, all cryptocurrencies will collapse. 7990 isnt the better ones for mining from an efficiency perspective though. 7950, 7970, 280x are best for efficiency. 7990, 290, 290x are awesome for pure hashrates, but pulls more power and generates more heatgreat for someone with free electricity and lives in a cold country. ATIs are better for mining than nV, and most places still carry nV cards.

The hashrates of all coins have increased significantly. Yea, the articles argument makes sense. It hasnt only been the past week though. Most started blindly jumping in when the articles about BTC being valued at $1300 showed up. That was like a month ago. Cards will continue to be in back order, hashrates will go up, and difficulty will go up until mid-Jan most likely.

Difficulty will most likely reach 22k in Jan/Feb. If value stays the same, it’ll become unprofitable around then. I totally agree with this article, gone are the days of BitCoin mining unless you literally own a mining farm. In my opinion. LiteCoin and AltCoin is the way to go now. Made some tidy profits with BitCoins in 1 year, but not any more. I’ve built all my mining rigs myself and now I’ve shifted those same rigs for LiteCoin and AltCoin mining.

And of course, the more people joining the race, the more those coins will climb in price. The early bird wins. Anyone wanting to have their own ready-made, turnkey mining rigs can email me: •. THe word TWATS comes to mind instantly! I’ve been looking everywhere for a decent graphics card so I can enjoy some downtime with some amazing PC games – and I can’t find ONE!

I have researched a few cards and settled on a few, I look for one ” OUT OF STOCK ” then I go for the next on the list ” OUT OF STOCK ” Who is to blame, the consumers or the suppliers? Neither but the suppliers better hurry up and get some hardware on the market! I’m pretty upset about the whole thing.

It’s like going to a supermarket and finding out there are no Cheerios left! I WILL NOT SETTLE FOR WEETABIX you fat greedy Litecoin miner bitches. Bitcoin&Litecoin Investment – 8000% after 48 hours PerfectMoney Finance can impress you with the solid experience in professional Forex trading and investment projectsd, qualified experts and always best service for our clients and partners. Plan Deposit Return PM1 $250-$2,000 8000% after 48 hours PM2 $2,001-$5,000 8000% after 36 hours PM3 $5,001-$10,000 8000% after 24 hours PM4 $10,001-$20,000 8000% after 12 hours PM5 $20,001-$49,999 8000% after 6 hours PM6 $50,000-$100,000 8000% after 4 hours Invest Now Investment Insurance.