In South Korea, investors have started to purchase CPUs equipped with high performance gaming graphic cards like the Nvidia GTX 1080 ti to mine smaller cryptocurrency listed on local exchanges, like Zcash and Ethereum Classic.
CPU Mining
Computer manufacturers in the local market such as Jooyeon Technology have also begun to release CPUs equipped with several high performance gaming chips designed and optimized specifically to mine cryptocurrencies. Jooyeon Technology recently released the Hash Guard, a CPU that contains 4 Nvidia GTX 1080 ti, a graphic card that is known to operate with minimal fan noise and water-cooling system to prevent the CPU from overheating.
Despite its high performance, one downside of the Hash Guard is its price. It costs more than $8,000, which is as expensive as one of the most costly CPUs in the world, manufactured by Apple. Still, because of its specifications and most importantly, its ability to mine cryptocurrencies with minimal resources, the demand for CPUs with high performance graphic cards has increased in South Korea.
EKN, a local media outlet, reported that investors within the cryptocurrency market has shifted from conventional investment in cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Ethereum to mining. Since CPUs like Hash Guard can be established and operate in a normal home with basic electricity consumption, investors can produce small-scale cryptocurrencies with substantial profits without allocating significant resources.
A spokesperson of Jooyeon Technology, the manufacturer of one of the country’s most popular CPU cryptocurrency miner, told EKN that many investors have started to utilize CPUs to mine initial coin offering (ICO) tokens, with hopes that the tokens they mine will increase exponentially in value.
“Apart from warranty and free of charge after sales service provided by a domestic PC manufacturer, the ability to utilize cryptocurrency miners as normal CPUs for work and casual use cases has led to an increase in demand towards CPU miners,” said the spokesperson. “A large portion of consumers are also anticipating and hoping that the price of ICO tokens increase, and are mining tokens with CPUs with big expectations.”
The spokesperson further emphasized that CPUs that fall behind the Hash Guard and Nvidia graphic cards can also mine smaller cryptocurrencies such as Monero, Ethereum Classic, Zcash, and Bitcoin Gold if CPUs operate 24 hours a day. For instance, the spokesperson stated that a two-way home cryptocurrency mining CPU equipped with AMD’s Ryzen 7 and RX570 can mine 0.0032 Ether, 0.00158 Monero, 0.1 Ethereum Classic, 0.0062 Zcash, and 0.023 Bitcoin Gold per day, if the CPU runs for 24 hours.
Major Correction
Analysts in the CPU manufacturing sector in South Korea noted that the demand for high performance gaming chips from Nvidia and AMD is on the rise because of the recent correction of the cryptocurrency market. Since January, most major cryptocurrency has fallen by more than 70 percent from their all-time highs.
Consequently, investors have started to search for alternative methods to generate profit in an extremely volatile period for the cryptocurrency market.
But, in the mid-term, issues may arise with CPUs, and with CPU mining in general, as more ASIC miners are released by companies like Bitmain and Samsung.