The rising value of Etherium is killing the GPU market, increasing the demand for already costly hardware thanks to the increased profitability of cryptocurrency mining. Cryptocurrency miners are now placing more stress on the GPU market, which is already undersupplied, causing the price of used graphics hardware to rise and many popular graphics cards to disappear from retailers.

Today, the cryptocurrency mining service Nicehash claimed that RTX 3080 owners could earn $8.20 per day by using their GPU to mine on their service. Nicehash allows its users to mine cryptocurrency for its users, with Nicehash offering its miners Bitcoin in return. Nicehash is less profitable than directly mining cryptocurrency, but it offers miners an easy entry point into cryptocurrency mining. In short, if Nicehash is this profitable, directly mining cryptocurrencies like Etherium is extremely profitable.

If the value of cryptocurrencies continues to rise, PC gamers should expect a repeat of 2017/2018, when cryptocurrency miners decimated retail stocks of graphics cards and inflated the used pricing of new and used graphics cards to insane levels. The high-end GPU market was already undersupplied, thanks to the demand of gamers alone, but now that situation is getting much much worse.

With AMD and Nvidia already struggling to supply the market with an adequate supply of graphics cards, it is hard to see today's GPU supply situation improving anytime soon. Early 2021 will be a tough time for all PC gamers who want an upgrade, and the situation is likely to worsen before it gets better.