Bought some cards during the Christmas break season and prices/availability were fine. I was surprised when I went to buy some more and saw the prices! I reason

Bought some cards during the Christmas break season and prices/availability were fine. I was surprised when I went to buy some more and saw the prices! I reason that if crypto currenices crash I can re-purpose my nice new collection of GPU's to do Deep Learning training. It's got me pondering how one could do a distributed deep-learning training as the proof-of-work for a crypto-currency. Then the POW would be doing useful work anyways! Along with causing issues with GPU card supplies there's been a lot of articles talking about how crypto-mining wastes electricity and hurts the environment. That's not necessarily the case across the board. Instead of running an electric heater this winter I am running a few GPU miners which produce a decent amount of heat. That helps me get a two-for-one benefit for ~9 months of the year since it's relatively chilly here year around. Might not work in all climates, but in many places its nice way to produce heat that'd just be waste heat anyways.