Bitcoin and most of the blockchain networks rely on a process called mining which is used to validate the entries to the distributed ledger. Mining is done by some people in the blockchain network who have to devote computational power to produce hashes which encrypts the transaction and add to the blockchain ledger. The advent of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have increased the demand for mining infrastructure and today it is a big player game.
There are many firms coming up with Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) for mining rigs. One of the major players among this, Bitmain a Chinese firm claims to cater about 70 percent of the mining rigs operating today across the world. Global manufacturers of Graphic Processors, NVidia and AMD also have come up with specific processors for the mining industry.
Further , these companies saw a steep increase in its profits towards the end of 2017 when most of the digital currency’ prices soared.Nvidia, for instance saw a year on year growth of 33 percent in its net income during this period. Similarly , NVidia’s major competitor AMD also enjoyed a booming profit during this time.
“Cryptocurrency and blockchain is here to stay. The market need for it is going to grow, and over time it will become quite large. It is very clear that new currencies will come to market, and it's very clear that the GPU is just fantastic at cryptography. And as these new algorithms are being developed, the GPU is really quite ideal for it. And so this is a market that is not likely to go away any time soon, and the only thing that we can probably expect is that there will be more currencies to come. It will come in a whole lot of different nations.”
- Jensen Huang, Founder, President and CEO, NVIDIA
Effect on gaming industry
At the same time PC games are coming up with more and more cutting edge and realistic graphics. Which in turn demands more system graphics requirements. What else requires high requirements like pc games?
The current shortage of end high graphics card
The gaming crowd is finding a reduced supply due to all the mining fuss which is going around. More demand also means, the emerging black markets . People are buying graphic card in enormous bulks and selling at skyrocketed price! The base price of the cards are also subsequently increasing .Let's take the case of radeon amd RX 580, it showed a sharp increase from $280 to $500.
With the increasing complexity in cryptographic problem, the miners are only gonna demand for more computational power.
All this is causing a drop in gaming industry market for this industry. How do you think this is gonna impact in a long run?
The solution being a separate line of cards for gaming purposes and for mining. The loyal gaming customers shouldn’t be given a chance to frown upon the graphics industry right?