Miners are holding livestreamed auctions just to shift them

An ongoing crash in cryptocurrency prices is causing some miners to abandon ship, selling off their racks ofgraphics cardsat discount prices in a bid to recoup some cash.Wccftechspotted that some erstwhile miners across China and South Asia, previously encouraged by low energy costs, are even hosting livestreamed auctions to get rid of their GPU ‘stock’ en masse.

First off: ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Second, while it’s entertaining to imagine desperate crypto barons hosting a kind of QVC channel for dusty PC components, I wouldn’t necessarily take this as a long-overdue opportunity to upgrade your graphics card on the cheap.

That’s not so much to do with the potential health of these cards. Buying used tech is always a bit of a gamble but research byLinus Tech Tipssuggests that even after being run 24/7 for months on end, ex-mining cards tend to only be negligibly slower than new models at worst. Nah, the more offputting issue with these GPUs is that they’re just… not that much cheaper than what you can get from your existing, local second-hand market?

Take theRTX 3060 Ti, which miners in China arereportedlyselling for the equivalent of $300-$350 (about £250-£300). Even a cursory glance at eBay reveals multiple listings at broadly similar prices, especially in the US, and although some of these also appear to have escaped mining rigs, the majority appear to be one-off sales from typical private sellers. And they come without the worry of having to import them from the other side of world, as well.

Also, to be blunt, many of the sellers now dumping their GPUs on auction sites are partly responsible for graphics cards being so expensive in the first place. Supply shortages played a part as well but if gaming GPUs weren’t gobbled up so quickly, for the purpose of extracting environment-melting funny money, it’s hard to see them becoming anywhere near as overpriced. If you are currently looking for a used graphics card, there are plenty of less avaricious sellers to give your cash to.