Hell no. I hate mining and so i will deffently not support a miner by buying his used cards after he. Al ready maked money with them. Maybe a silly thing, but the last year or two has been a hell for us gamers. So i will not support mining in any way neither by getting miners left overs.
But a used card from a regular gamer or other non mining cards. Sure no problems with buying used cards.
I feel that. The whole situation with mining is frustrating. I was out of the loop for years until January this year. Imagine looking at GPU prices for the first time back then - arguably at the peak of pricing insanity. The more you learn, the angrier you get. You just think "How could this happen?" And you're looking for reasons why - people to blame.
But lately I've been having a different attitude. I don't feel like you can really blame miners. They're just putting their skin in the game to do what they wanna do. And they took big chances. They paid good money to have what they do. Nothing wrong with trying to make money. And most of them do it honestly. They pay for goods provided to them. They pay what it's worth to them. And clearly it's worth more to them than it is to us. Sometimes that's just capitalism. Things are worth whatever people are willing to pay. And on the flipside, you can't expect sellers to sell for less when there are those who will buy them out for more. It's arguably dishonest, but unfortunately when supply is low, you really do have to sell high to cover increased cost in logistics, manufacturing, and "idle" operating time. Every minute spent not making a sale is money out of their pockets. If they have no cards to sell, they lose money. Trying to be the good guy in this situation will quickly put you out of business. And actually, it doesn't help with scarcity. It actually makes cards even harder to get, because people buy them up even faster. There's no possible way to make sustainable income selling at MSRP when there is a shortage. Nobody really benefits from it. Price:volume is not an even exchange across the scale. It costs more per item to move less volume. Period.
Sucks to be the little guy in that situation but again it is what it is and there no blaming the buyers/sellers there. Nature of the beast. Supply and demand. Think of it the other way around. If gamers were buying up all of the cards miners wanted, would it be fair for them to blame us? Doesn't make sense to me. It's not the buyer's faults that sellers/manufacturers aren't adequately meeting demand to a point where everyone can access what they want for a price they find agreeable. There nothing miners or gamers can really do about that. You can't expect people to not buy what they need when they can.
Mining is such an unknown when it comes to sustainable revenue. Double-edged sword. Gaming and industry sector are the sure bets. Mining comes and goes, but those demands never change. GPU manufacturers know this well, but I think they couldn't resist being a little greedy. If you lose the trust and confidence of that sector, it can really hurt you in the long run. If mining falters, you need those people to support you. I think they didn't have good foresight from the very beginning. They didn't expect mining to be this big, but they also just didn't catch the demand fast enough. By the time they figured it out, it was too late to act. And the choices they did make in that time only made things worse.
Or maybe they chose not to catch up and make enough available, instead choosing to make more than triple what they were projected to make off of what they already had and try to move foreward that way. They jumped on the opportunity to make more money on fewer goods, but they were too scared to try and anticipate the continued demand to make more cards... ...meaning they didn't keep the money flowing. They didn't want to be stuck with a bunch that they would have to sell for too little profit to move forward later. But ultimately, even selling ridiculously high, they didn't have enough cards to kick around. And that hurt everyone. Gamers, miners, retailers, and manufacturers. Shot the whole market to pieces. They actually lost money by making less cards and charging so much. Scarcity was driven up so high that nobody wanted to buy what they had left after a certain point. All you could really do was wait, or buy used. That's what everyone did. Just when they wanted to be selling out the last of their older cards, nobody was buying. And that's probably why prices are falling now. They have to sell at a loss now. Give and take, man.
Sometimes I wonder if they really made all that much more off of miners to begin with. I think initially they did, but by now things are evening out for them and they're starting to really feel the withdrawal. I think they were hoping to avoid the blow of increased memory costs by allowing the shortage to run... ...and it kind of blew up in everyone's faces. But I dunno. That's something I never got. The actual chip makers don't benefit from price inflation. They don't sell more chips that way. Only the retailers get fat.
If you want to blame anyone, blame the card manufacturers for not making enough cards for us to buy, and retailers to sustainably sell at a fair price. Miners are just people with goals and money to spend, just like anybody else. You can't blame them simply for existing and doing what we all wish to have the right to do, which is spend our money how we please. Buyers aren't entitled to what they want just because they want it. Our role there is to let our money speak for what we want. You CAN blame the suppliers/manufacturers for not handling this in a fair and sustainable way. THEY are the reason GPU prices are still in recovery. If anything, it wasn't just us gamers who were taken advantage of. Miners were really just as used and abused by the powers that be. They knew they would pay up, so they drove things up higher and higher, all while offering weak recourse for the lack of supply... ...in the long run it's a terrible move for them but it seems like nobody on top really cared enough to see that. Or maybe they really were just that out of touch. I really don't know.
To me, you can play the blame game all day, but it doesn't change a thing. If you don't buy miner's cards, somebody else will. In this market, even used cards are coveted. Personally, I prefer to make lemonade out of it. I'd rather have a new card at a reasonable price, but it's not happening. I can wait and be sad about it, or I can take full advantage of the fact that there are a ton of mining cards now in circulation at well, well below MSRP. That's the good side of this. Gamers can really benefit from this, you know?
To me, that's things coming back around to us. When the miners start bailing, you get a flood of often perfectly fine cards sold at a "just get rid of it" price. That means you don't HAVE to support the people who think you should pay double MSRP for a GPU. If we didn't have this option, we'd be stuck supporting the truly greedy ones in this whole debacle. Instead, we get to say "I can't condone these practices." with our money, to the people at the very top of the shit pile. I won't be buying a new GTX 10xx or RTX 20xx. And I'm glad that I won't have to compromise on that to get what I want.
I'd rather buy from a miner than from the companies responsible for allowing the market to be so terribly disrupted and unbalanced by the surge in demand. It's not the people creating the demand - it's the people who are supposed to be supplying it. You can't blame a market for wanting what it wants. By me and everyone else buying used instead of new, we're kind of sticking it to them. It's as if to say "You wanna sell cards at ridiculously inflated and inaccessible prices to miners? Fine. FUCK you then. I just won't support you, period." It represents a demand they can't tap into and benefit from.
And then, when the miners stop buying and start selling off to people who otherwise would've had no choice but to pay the absurd prices, everyone responsible for this is going to feel that. Every time somebody buys a used mining card instead of a new 10xx or 20xx, that's money not in the pockets of the people who sought to take advantage of the situation and mess everything up. I mean, when everyone's buying used and there's no new money entering the market, supply goes up and value goes down. Bad for sellers, but good for buyers. And it serves them fuckin right. At the end of the day, I'd rather not support the people actually pushing these insane pricing schemes. I'm gonna pay what it's actually worth to me, every time. If the miners are asking for what it's worth to me, I pay them, not the ones overcharging. To me, it's just that simple. Things might actually change that way.
Just food for thought. I can't pretend to understand it all. And I do see both sides of it. I feel that pain and live with it just like everyone else. Best you can do is find the most beneficial course of action for you as you see fit. But it really is a question of who to really support in this. Personally I don't think buying a miner's cards has all that much impact on mining as a whole. What they make on that is a drop in the pan. At the end of the day, their success is at the mercy of the crypto markets, not gamers buying a few spare cards.
