Ethereum Mining Is Swallowing Up New GPUs, But A Solution Is Coming

Jason Evangelho
3 min readJan 20, 2021

As I write this, a single Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti graphics card is capable of much more than delivering a quality 1440p gaming experience. It’s also capable of earning you $4.22 USD in profit per day from mining cryptocurrency such as Ethereum.

That’s a big deal, because at $399 MSRP, a miner’s ROI (return on investment) for the RTX 3060 Ti is roughly 100 days.

Yep, it’s 2017 all over again as potential profits from GPU-powered mining reach record highs alongside a booming interest in Bitcoin. And PC gamers are not remotely impressed.

Estimated profit as of January 20, 2021

That’s because the existing scarcity of Nvidia’s (and AMD’s) current-gen graphics cards is exacerbated by unrelenting demand from miners — miners who typically buy in bulk. The result has been empty virtual and retail shelves, in addition to absurdly inflated pricing.

(On a very related note, Nvidia allegedly sold $175 Million worth of its RTX 30 series GPUs directly to miners in late 2020.)

Thankfully, two new crypto-specific products spotted by WCCFTech are allegedly being prepped to (hopefully) alleviate the problem.

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Jason Evangelho

Technology addict, Linux enthusiast, musician, and writer. Currently reviving my imagination from a coma. Also an American in Croatia.