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Shipments of GPUs are being slowed down or suspended in light of a slowdown in demand driven by cryptocurrency miners:
Taiwan-based graphics card makers including Gigabyte Technology, Micro-Star International (MSI) and TUL are expected to see their shipments for April plunge over 40% on month, as many clients have suspended taking shipments in response to drastic slowdown in demand for cryptocurrency mining machines, according to industry sources.
Channel distributors and larger mining farm operators have cut orders with makers of mining graphics cards and mining motherboards or asked them to suspend shipments due to the crypto mining craze waning abruptly from the beginning of April, the sources said.
Quite a few mining farm operators have even stopped purchasing graphic cards, as they are awaiting the rollout of Ethereum mining machines by China's Bitmain in the third quarter of 2018. They anticipate mining rewards to pick up gradually in the third quarter, as Bitcoin and Ethereum values may rebound following sharp declines seen in early 2018, the sources indicated.
Previously: AMD GPU Supply Exhausted By Cryptocurrency Mining, AIBs Now Directly Advertising To Miners
Cryptocoin GPU Bubble?
Ethereum Mining Craze Leads to GPU Shortages
Used GPUs Flood the Market as Ethereum's Price Crashes Below $150
Cryptocurrency Mining Wipes Out Vega 64 Stock
GPU Cryptomining Hurting SETI and Other Astronomy Projects
Related: AMD Profits in Q3 2017
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 28 2018, @12:07AM
To elaborate on my previous post, this is not the broken window fallacy because coin mining doesn't happen because we want better high tech industries (such as ASIC and FPGA development and GPU production, etc). That instead is a happy coincidence. Instead, mining occurs voluntarily, indicating that the activity has sufficient value to the involved parties to justify their investments in it. At this point, I merely am speaking of further benefit beyond that of the "fundamentally useless" mining itself.
Now, when one is second-guessing the value of Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies, one is actually second-guessing free peoples' decisions and opinions. Which is fine as long as you realize that they have a similar level of respect for your non-binding opinion. Recall a key part of the setup for the broken window fallacy. Someone had decided that higher economic activity was more important than peoples' windows, and thus, broke those windows without the consent of the window owners.
We don't have a top-down government or other group forcing people to mine bitcoins in order to prop up their ASIC/FPGA/GPU industries. Thus, we don't have the initial conditions for the fallacy.