Gadgetory

- So cryptocurrency has made its way back into the news with a recent price surge from Bitcoin itself and then that sort of flowed on to all those other alt coins but as a gamer should you be worried about those cryptocurrency miners buying up all your graphics cards like we saw in 2017. Well, we're gonna answer those questions and talk about the market in general with cryptocurrency as I haven't delved into it for quite some time. But let's lay out those facts for all the yes men and women out there. And this right here is actually a very old graphics card, it has nothing to do with cryptocurrency mining and in fact if you were to mine on a GTX 650, you'd probably be losing money. (rock music) So cryptocurrency mining, it first made an appearance using gaming grade hardware back in 2012 and 2013 with AMD Radeon cards mining for Bitcoin. After that came a big demand for a thing called an ASIC miner which is an application-specific integrated circuit which was dedicated to doing one thing and that's mining the Bitcoin algorithm. So with that it was much more efficient at mining this cryptocurrency than gaming graphics cards ever were and ever could be. However after this break, cryptocurrency then saw it as penetrating the world market and this is where we saw a severe shortage in gaming graphics cards in the market to the point where MSRPs were being affected on new graphics cards from Nvidia and AMD and that's when there was a popular resurgence in used hardware for people looking to get into PC gaming. Now in relation to the last boom we saw in 2017, this was related to alt coins. In other words, cryptocurrencies that weren't Bitcoin and they were in demand. Popular cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and then Z cash and ZenCash really made a demand for these graphics cards and their mining capabilities and with that, I think a lot of gamers saw it as a safe bet, myself included because if cryptocurrency went bust, you then had a fallback where you could sell your hardware to gamers. If we look at the other side of the fence in relation to ASIC miners, once they're redundant, they're pretty much useless. That hardware is as good as useless. It can't do any gaming, can't do really anything besides collect dust. Now here's where things start to split off in two different directions and why I don't think you have to worry in 2019 if you're a gamer looking to upgrade your system or get into PC gaming and the first being is that the actual profitability of using a gaming graphics card to mine cryptocurrencies is so little and it's actually reliant on how much it costs you to use electricity in your area. For instance, if we go on watttomine.com, and look at an RX 570 which can be had for very cheap at the moment on the used market. Those cards, if you were paying 10 cents a kilowatt-hour USD would give you 20 cents per day profitability which basically isn't even worth your time and hassle considering that's a 24-hour calculation every day, all day and so after that timeframe of you getting your money back, your graphics card is probably going to run into problems before it even completes this cycle of getting your money back. If we look at new cards like our RTX 2070s, RTX 2080 TIs, they pretty much fall into the same category where a cryptocurrency called Ravencoin is coming up with giving you around 60 cents plus on an RTX 2070 than on a 2080 TI you can get up to over one dollar per day which would take it over three years for you to get your investment back considering you didn't run into any problems in the mean time. So we can see from this, this is it's pretty much not profitable to use a gaming graphics card to mine cryptocurrency and that's considering you can get power that cheap. Where I live in Australia, it's about 20 cents per kilowatt-hour USD so I'd actually be losing money if I was mining cryptocurrencies on gaming graphics cards. Now I don't think there's going to be a whole lot of demand for gaming great graphics cards in 2019 for cryptocurrency mining and that's because a lot of the alt coins that were competing with Bitcoin have now cemented themselves and they too are using ASIC miners. So there's really no demand for gaming graphics cards when it comes to cryptocurrencies and then even off that branch, if we get new cryptocurrencies, are people going to trust them and what do they have to offer of the already flooded market of alt coins that already exists. So basically I feel like there's a dwindling demand for new cryptocurrencies that are alt coins that have anything better to offer than the plethora of cryptocurrencies that are already out there on the market and then if we look at correlations between things like the Dow Jones Industrial Average for example having pretty much a bull market at the same time with a cryptocurrency market that is now plateauing off at a level where I feel like we may be entering a recession in terms of stock markets which I feel would be heavily correlated to cryptocurrencies. So there is a lot of uncertainty out there in 2019 about the direction of money markets themselves. And then the last observation I've made is relation to ZenCash, a previous cryptocurrency that I was interested in is now sort of breaking lower than Bitcoin's average. In other words, there's pent-up demand more so for Bitcoin, the main cryptocurrency than there is for other alt coins, at least in this case ZenCash with us breaking down and away and lower in price in comparison to Bitcoin than it is to other alt coins. So as I said in my previous cryptocurrency videos, trends are always your friend and you should always crack on to them and in this case, I feel like Bitcoin itself has made strides and since then, I've noticed Bitcoin has had a lot of upgrades. They've improved the infrastructure a lot and so I can definitely see that cryptocurrency remaining toppdogg for quite some time yet. So in a nutshell, if you are a PC gamer and you're in the market for a gaming graphics card, I feel like in 2019, you don't have a whole lot to worry about like what we saw in 2017. But there are some arguments as to why cryptocurrency mining on graphics cards could see a resurgence and that is because people like using their gaming graphics card to support hashing while they're not gaming and that's always been an argument to say, hey I can support some kind of cause while I'm not gaming and I can utilize this hardware to hash or make money but at the moment as we said before, it's really not profitable to be doing that on a gaming graphics card. Then maybe the last argument for the resurgence of cryptocurrency mining on gaming graphics cards could be sentiment. Over this in my opinion is a bigger against than it is a for. Simply put, it I feel like the market has changed and that there's a lot of actual negative sentiment towards cryptocurrency rather than for it especially in relation to alt coins and mining on gaming grade hardware. I know for a fact that a lot of my friends who set out to mine on gaming grade hardware actually ended up losing money overall but not only that ended up losing their time and so these are a lot of tech enthusiasts who knew how to set up this hardware and get into it and if they're not making money then their word of mouth is gonna spread around and so I do feel like going forward and although sentiment can change very quickly, I feel like it's a very strong build up against mining on gaming grade hardware. So these are the main factors when we revisit cryptocurrency in 2019. Why I don't think we're gonna see that big blow up that we saw in 2017 and if anything, we could just see a main focus on what already exists. Things like Ripple, Ethereum and Bitcoin could be those main drivers that have already proven themselves in the market and have real-world uses and so they're going to continue to go up and break away from some of these alt coins which will then continue to go down and lose market sentiment as well as value. Anyway guys, that's about it for today's video. I hope you enjoyed this one. If you did, be sure to hit that like button. Let us know though in the comment section below what do you think will happen with cryptocurrency and gaming graphics cards in 2019. I think we're honestly at a safe level and I think with other economic conditions happening, this year sort of leaves my stomach a little bit uneasy and so that's just my gut feeling. I've learned to trust this thing right here and that's an awesome shirt if you want to get that, there's a link in the description below for that tech, yes, love and merch and with that said, love each and every one of you guys and with that said too, don't believe everything you see on the news in relation to Bitcoin and price. There's this article going on. The trading volumes up four-fold, but when you look at the trading volume verse a few years ago, it's down massively. So users news, I don't take it too seriously. I just listen to instinct as weird as that sounds and I'll catch you guys in another tech video very soon. Rejoice, your gaming graphics cards are safe. Peace out for now, bye. (upbeat techno music)