INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Serious flooding in the Chinese province of Sichuan has disrupted cryptocurrency mining operations located there, which could potentially
have something of a knock-on effect in terms of increased demand for graphics cards, to replace boards which have been damaged.This could be
bad news for the average consumer in terms of GPU pricing, but to explain why, we need to take a couple of steps back, and look at the
overall picture.Essentially, this is another unpredictable variable that is being thrown into the currently complex equation of supply and
demand in the graphics card market
course of July, to get that stock sold
As the China-based Economic Daily News reports (via DigiTimes), no less than 70% of the cryptocurrency mining systems in China are located
in the global statistics for Bitcoin mining output (hashrate), which has dropped from 43TH/s last week to around 30TH/s (as PCGamesN
observes).That underlines the apparent extent of the effect of this flood, and it means that there is expected to be a short-term surge in
what spikes in cryptocurrency mining demand can do to the GPU market, as not so long ago, retail prices were massively inflated by such
then the damaged hardware is likely to be mainly ASIC rigs, which are far more efficient when it comes to Bitcoin, as opposed to PCs
bristling with GPUs.So the net result is that demand might not surge as much for graphics cards, but the worry is there could still be some
traction in this respect, and that could put a dampener on the prospect of reduced GPU prices that we reported on earlier this week.Any
episode really underlines is the volatility of the cryptocurrency mining world, not just in terms of wild value fluctuations, but other
external forces like natural disasters
And unfortunately, the mining arena is now tied to the GPU market, and its volatility has an impact on the latter, too.
