The latest podcast from Hardware Asylum is now available. In Episode 77a Dennis Garcia and Darren McCain take on the topic of digital currency mining and its effects on the PC component market and more. Here are the show notes:

In the time between when this Podcast Extra was recorded and subsequently released we saw Ethereum rise the popularity viral ranks, crash due to fake (or staged) news on 4chan, recover (kinda) and then completely fall out of popularity due to mining difficulty and share price.

It makes you wonder how big corporations actually made money back before the Great Depression and before the advent of stock regulations. it is a little known fact that stock manipulation and deceptive news stories would cause investors to flood or dump a stock based on nothing more than what a respected reporter was publishing. This often lead to quick sales or prompting investors to short a stock in hopes it will go down in price. Stuff like that has become more difficult these days however in the cryptocurrency world something as simple as a fake death story can cause investors to dump everything which will cause the price to plummet as investor confidence declines . It also creates a perfect investment opportunity much like it did for the American stock market some 100 years ago. So, why the history lesson?

Well, I am getting really tired of NVIDIA Pascal based GPUs always being out of stock. At first, during the launch, it was due to demand and low stocks. However, now it is because the superior power efficiency is making GPU mining more affordable. In fact ASUS has released a dedicated mining card based on the GTX 1060 that is just like any other video card except it has no video output. This makes the card worthless on the open market but gives miners a dedicated product for crypto mining with increased reliability while leaving the gaming GPUs to do what they do best in the hands of enthusiasts that know how to use them.

Catch the full podcast here on Hardware Asylum.