Crypto currencies are all the rage. Only recently the rate for the currency Bitcoin reached a value of 30. 000 US dollars per bitcoin one new record. In the last two weeks alone, the value moved over 10. 000 US dollars. No wonder then that there are more and more people who want to participate in the hype.

In connection with graphics cards, the term “mining” appears more and more frequently. This describes the calculation of crypto currencies, such as Ethereum or Bitcoin, with the help of a lot of computing power for the purpose of value creation. The amount of the individual currencies is limited by the fact that the arithmetic operations are becoming more and more demanding and therefore more and more performance is required.

In the meantime, miners are building huge setups from dozens of graphics cards in order to keep up with the increasing demands. This is not only ecologically questionable, also with regard to the availability of new graphics cards, there is an increasing problem here.

Provides a prominent example of this phenomenon the miner Simon Byrne. While many others are still waiting in vain for their pre-ordered GeForce RTX 3080, the US-American was able to 78 Claim models for yourself. Paired with many other GTX – 1080 – Ti models it comes with a whole 143 Graphics cards which, according to their own statement, have a net profit of about 900 should generate US dollars per day.

According to TechArp, the miner is based in Las Vegas. The electricity costs there are around ten cents per kilowatt hour. If you take the official TDP of the RTX 3080 from 320 W is based on electricity costs of around 1. 800 US dollars per Month. In Germany this value would amount to about three times as much. In addition, it is not known how Byrne works with whole 64 models of the coveted RTX 3080 how much he paid for it. However, he speaks of the initial investments, which should have been at least in the high double-digit range, within 50 days to catch up again.

How the crypto mining market will develop is unclear. If the hype persists, the availability problems of new generations of graphics cards are likely to worsen in the future.