You’ve probably noticed an increase in pricing for most GPU’s on the market, especially for the great and powerful GTX 1080Ti which is supposedly the best mining card you can aquire for mining. From 1st of January the prices skyrocketed and the stocks were empty in about two or three weeks, if gamers wanted a new GPU to enjoy relaxing moments, they would have been very disappointed when they found out that they have to wait for the production of more units to be sold.
The mining fever took hold of most people and all shops seized the opportunity to make a bit of profit of this trend. Selling the graphical cards with a 30% increase in price to even 50% in some cases. I’m not going to go further into data because there are many articles you can find about how much it cost and who raised the bar.
What I want to discuss, however, is the choice one would make if they have a considerable sum of money stashed away for his or hers needs.
Let’s make a scenario, shall we? You have 2000$ and you wish to spend all of them on some new tech. You can either go with the no headache way and just configure yourself a PC that will last you five more years from that moment on. Have fun and enjoy all the newest technology of gaming has to offer, you can even buy yourself a VR with a couple more money and start destroying stuff in your home while wearing a pair of glasses. This way your investment is in your own personal pleasure.
Or you can read a ton of documentation on how to mine cryptocurrencies and watch hours of videos on this subject to get yourself in the trending fever of 2018. If you read articles that tell you it’s easy to mine, don’t buy into what they are selling, you’re doing this so you can have the maximum profit in the shortest time period possible. If you want to recover your investment in less than six months then keep in mind you have to learn about what coin to mine, which algorithm to use and how to calculate your power costs each month. This is not an easy task if you have a job or other things to worry about in your life. No one guarantees you will recover the investment or that you’ll be profitable. You have to be prepared to wave your investment money away. Sure you can do both but think of it like time money, you're satisfying your desire to play for a couple of hours per day but you're losing precious coin mining. Depending on the rig you make, if you choose to do both you will make money and be happy but it would just take twice as long to recover your investment. There is also the problem of components lifetime.
The more you use them the more the hardware gets used, and remember all products have an expiration date. If I were to advice someone to take a decision I would go for money now, playing later. The gaming industry is growing and becoming better so you can sacrifice two years of your life to make a couple of money and then you’ll have enough to do what you wish. For some people it's very hard to control their urges and all they want to do is relax through playing. You could tell them they will be making millions and still they won't care about that. Of course you would be lying but even if you were to tell them a realistic sum and you would have proof of it, they still won't give up their two to four hours of playing a game that in one or two years will be junk. What would you pick? Would you try to test the theory that piled money attracts money? Or would you rather spend time in your happy bubble playing games? Tough choice isn't it. Hope you enjoyed my ramblings of gamer vs miner and please tell me your opinion about this in a comment.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this one.