PC gamers may find themselves struggling to find AMD’s RX 570 or RX 580 available anywhere near it’s MSRP.The great surge in demand comes from the recent spike in the price of Bitcoin, which has increased from roughly $500 a year ago to $2193 as of the time of writing.When Bitcoin’s price rises, the USD value of other crypto-currencies such as Litecoin and Ethereum usually rise proportionally to Bitcoin.Crypto-currencies are an emerging, decentralized, peer to peer currency sent using the internet.Their money supply initially comes from a process known as “mining” in which computing devices such as GPUs perform luck-based operations that are used to claim “block rewards” containing the currency.The primary purpose of cryptocurrencies is to eliminate the need for trust in a central organization such as a bank, although many cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum have adapted additional features such as “smart-contracts”.While the mining of Bitcoin and Litecoin using GPUs has become obsolete due to specialized devices know as ASICs, Ethereum is currently extremely profitable to mine using GPUs.

An Ethereum miner can expect to earn $100-150  per month worth of Ethereum per RX 580 they mine with, based on current exchange rates and a variable called “difficulty”, which makes mining less profitable as more mining power comes online.This current rate of profitability is expected to drop in the future(this is not the first mining craze), so miners are buying as many cards as they can now to take advantage of it while they can.If the trend continues, the supply of NVIDIA GPUs may be threatened too.The GTX 1070 mines at a rate similar to the RX 580.With prices of RX 580’s surpassing the GTX 1070, miners may choose to purchase NVIDIA GPUs for mining purposes.If you’re looking to sell a used AMD GPU such as a RX 470/480 with the intent to upgrade, now may be the best time to sell, while the demand is extremely high.If mining profitability drops to the point of not covering electricity costs(highly probable), there will likely be a mass selloff of AMD cards, thus crashing the price of used AMD GPUs.

Such an event may create an opportunity to pick up used AMD GPUs for cheap, but buyers should be cautious, as cards used for mining are under heavy load 24/7.Take advantage of your GPU and easily set up mining with no text configuration or programmming needed!bitcoin price rmDisclosure: Author owns 2 shares of AMD valued at a total of $22 as of date of publication.bitcoin infiniti pokerAuthor holds less than $5 worth of cryptocurrency(primarily in Bitcoin) as of time of publication.litecoin block hash algorithmIt's spade sellers who REALLY make a killing in a gold rush: It's OVER for graphics card mining New Litecoin hardware means alt miners will ditch their packs If you’ve been mining "low-price Bitcoin wannabe" Litecoins with a rig of graphics cards, now is the time to shuffle them off to eBay – unless you can find a better use for them.bitcoin fy

Chinese chip manufacturer Innosilicon is now selling its “A2 Terminator”, a 28nm ASIC for mining Litecoins.It follows on the heels of its A1 offering, a Bitcoin ASIC.The A2 is capable of 1.8 mega hashes per second (MH/s) at only 13W power consumption, and Innosilicon configures this to 88MH/s per box performance with a 750W power supply.bitcoin piyasasıThat means one A2 ASIC will beat the best GPU graphics card in the world by almost twice the performance yet consumes 40 times less power.ethereum cash depositAll this means nothing, though, if you're spending more on power than you're making on the transactions.Chips and miners are now being sold with chips at $199 each and miners at $12k but this is aimed at resellers who will order at least 20 miners at a time.Innosilicon has beaten rival ASIC-pusher KnC Miner to be the first to ship a Litecoin chip, with the KnC Titian being listed as coming in “Q2/Q3” this year, and costing $5,495 for a 150MH/s box.

At the time of writing, Litecoin were trading at $9.85 each but more typically people mining Litecoin exchange them for Bitcoins and arbitrage the difference in the relative growth in complexity of Litecoin and Bitcoin.The arms race from the introduction of Litecoin hardware will soon make graphics card mining uneconomic.We’ve seen exactly the same path taken by Bitcoin, which went from processor mining, to graphics card GPU mining to custom ASICs, and we are now seeing a battle between the manufacturers of Bitcoin ASICs.Litecoin appears to be taking the same route.People who had been using the GPUs on graphics cards switched to Litecoin when the Bitcoin difficulty made the approach uneconomical.There are other alternative currencies which might have some mileage for graphics cards, but this really does feel like the end of the road for the approach.You thought the BITCOIN market was unstable?Amateur While people keep Bitcoins, they seem more likely to trade Litecoins – which makes the market even more unstable.

Bitcoins peaked at over $1,000 a coin but for the past month have been unusually stable at between $450 and $500.This reduces the arbitrage opportunities as the Litecoin difficulty also increases and what is necessary for Litecoin to be economic is a lag between the rate at which Bitcoin and Litecoin difficulty increases coupled with a rise in the value of Bitcoins.Despite Nvidia claiming that it is growth in gaming that has led to its recent better-than-expected fourth quarter results, there must be a significant level of mining in these figures and the move to ASICs can only serve to cool the sales of the very fastest graphics cards.® Tips and correctionsSeveral things:#1: GPU mining for bit coins has largely wound down as it no longer represents the best return on investment.(Non-specializedhardware comparison)Due to the rising hashrate of the bitcoin network caused by the introduction of ASICs to the market, GPU mining Bitcoins has become impracticable.The hashrate of most GPU units is below 1GH/s, and as of 2014, some single ASIC units are able to reach speeds of over 1,000GH/s while consuming far less power than used by a GPU.#2: GPUs are better suited to the task of bitcoin mining (Why a GPU mines faster than a CPU)A CPU core can execute 4 32-bit instructions per clock (using a 128-bit SSE instruction) or 8 via AVX (256-Bit), whereas a GPU like the Radeon HD 5970 can execute 3200 32-bit instructions per clock (using its 3200 ALUs or shaders).

This is a difference of 800 (or 400 in case of AVX) times more instructions per clock.As of 2011, the fastest CPUs have up to 6, 8, or 12 cores and a somewhat higher frequency clock (2000-3000 MHz vs.725 MHz for the Radeon HD 5970), but one HD5970 is still more than five times faster than four 12-core CPUs at 2.3GHz#3: GPUs are cheap compared to things like Xeons.12 core Xeon price tags get into the $2,000+ range.You could buy 3-4 very high end CPUs for the cost of a single XEON.GPU mining makes more economic sense than CPU mining because it's significantly more efficient.Of course, these days, it's all ASICs anyway.I love Xeons... they're very useful for tasks that aren't GPU compute friendly.But, Bitcoin mining is very GPU compute friendly.So, GPUs were the favored tool for mining.(Note: GPUs were also favored for Litecoin mining about a year ago, which resulted in hugely inflated GPU prices and incredible scarcity of high end AMD GPUs Q4 2013 / Q1 2014 until AMD leaned on retailers to bring prices closer to MSRP... but that's a whole different topic.)Better performance on a cost per watt basis.