I always enjoy a good, forceful and well written editorial once and while, but it’s not a pleasure that I get to indulge in too often. Which is why it was great to see Dennis Garcia put together a pretty hard-hitting editorial piece on the topic of Crypto Currency mining. Dennis, writing for Hardware Asylum, raises many of the issues that will have had PC enthusiasts and overclockers scratching their heads. How has the rise of currency mining affected the PC market? How did we get here? What’s going to happen next, and is there any hope at all for future? Here’s a taste of what Dennis has to say on the topic of the Bitcoin boom:

Remember at this point big hardware makers like MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte were surviving on Chinese demand. RGB LEDs?, Gold heatsinks. Ya, all of that is because the Chinese and emerging markets LOVE that stuff. In 2014 there was a spike in Bitcoin price. For years it was hovering around $100 USD a coin but it sharply spiked to $1000 USD and started a mining craze. News outlets were reporting on it and more and more people started to get involved with the promise that your gaming PC could mine for these digital coins which equated to free money.

The demand was short lived and when the Bitcoin difficulty jumped enough to make GPU mining unaffordable miners started to diversify and ASIC hardware (specialized hashrate miners) took over. AMD GPUs are powerhouses when it comes to mining due to how many cores are available but, they are hot and require a lot of power to operate which makes GPU mining unaffordable.

Then something happened, May 2016 at the Dreamhack gamer gathering in Austin Texas NVIDIA CEO Jen-Husn Huang launched the GTX 1080 and Pascal GPU architecture. This new GPU was insane. It was super powerful with 2x the performance of previous generations and 3x the efficiency of the (then) current Titan X.

As someone who regularly spends days of his life tapping a keyboard, it’s great to see a tech journalist pen a really good piece that not only speaks from the heart, but also raises several important issues. Read the full ‘PC Landscape with Cryptocurrency’ piece from Dennis here on Hardware Asylum. Nice work chaps.