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Why is the mining market not dependable?

• trinovantes 5y ago
  It crashed back in 2018 and dumped a lot of cheap GPUs on the aftermarket. Nvidia plans production runs years in advance and can't handle the randomness of sudden crypto crashes
• paulmd 5y ago
  huge variations in the price of crypto lead to enormous mining boom/bust cycles that are impossible to plan for. Semiconductor fab planning operates at least a year in advance, and even then there are limits, TSMC has other customers and NVIDIA can't order 100% of TSMC's supply even if they wanted to. But in a day, crypto prices can 10x, or 0.1x, and this occurs relatively frequently (potentially tied to large capital injections from a questionable "stablecoin" called Tether). When that happens, mining suddenly becomes 10x as profitable, and miners hoover up every card on the market for the next 6 months, so the market goes through a prolonged shortage and periods of very high prices (as market economics dictate). Then when it crashes, miners dump all the cards back on to the market, and then NVIDIA has to drop prices to compete with a flood of used cards. It's all basically impossible to plan around given the realities of silicon production.