Great news gamers – Cryptominers don't care about GPUs anymore

techradar.com:

Computing giant Asus claims that demand from cryptominers for consumer graphics cards is «disappearing», though it anticipates that shipments of its desktop PCs will fall by 10%, with motherboard and graphics card shipments dropping 10-15% over the previous quarter.

As reported by The Register, Asus co-CEO S.Y. Hsu said during the company's Q1 earnings call that the fall in demand was likely caused by the crypto industry's intent to move away from GPU-based mining for Ethereum, the world's second most popular cryptocurrency behind Bitcoin.

“Because the demand for cryptocurrency mining on GPU shipments has been slowly coming down, the demand for graphics cards across the market is normalizing,” he said. 

The lack of interest from miners likely has very little to do with the current crypto market crash (The price of Ethereum fell to $1,770 this week, down from $4,600 back in November 2021), though this could also provide some benefits for the PC gaming and building community. 

Existing mining farms might look to sell off their existing hardware to recover some cash, so we could expect an influx of cheap, used graphics cards to flood the market, though these are typically a risky buy given how intensely they run while mining.

Still, even without used GPUs flooding sites like eBay or Facebook marketplace we can expect PC gamers to encounter less competition from cryptominers in the coming months, which should make it easier to snag that GeForce RTX 3080 you might be eyeing up.

Mining Ethereum using commercial cards is no longer as viable as it was now that the cryptocurrency has started to move to proof-of-stake, from the previous proof-of-work method previously used by Bitcoin.

In simple terms, proof-of-work is a validation method