Bitmain teases Ethereum miner as fast as 32x RTX 3080 GPUs

[Spreadie]

AFAIK the fact they are selling the generation of hardware, means they are already running the G10 internally. This certainly used to be their strategy - the fastest ones they had were used internally until the difficulty jumped up a level & they had their next product ready to go, at which point they swap out and sell to the rest of the market. They own quite a few mining farms in China.

Lets them have a bit of the cherry on both ends,

So, as soon as the efficiency starts tailing off they swap out for next gen and flog the current stuff while it's still marginally attractive. Sweet deal.

[[GSV]Trig]

If its true, its not a bad business model, mine on the stuff you have, get coins, then use the cash coming in from selling the old ones to purchase the hardware to build the new stuff..

[Spud1]

So, as soon as the efficiency starts tailing off they swap out for next gen and flog the current stuff while it's still marginally attractive. Sweet deal.

Yep. You see the exact same pattern all the way down the chain. Heck back when BTC was actually profitable to mine at home (which is crazy to think of since at the time it was only a few hundred $/BTC) I would buy Antminers a few generations old which had been through several hands first, use them for a few months and then resell on ebay.

It was win-win as you tended to get back what you paid for the miner and made a bit of cash along the way. Apart from the first one I bought, which I kept as a memory of when BTC was actually a profitable thing to mine in the UK.

I just wish I had not used my BTC there and then, like so many people i'd be rich by now!

[EvilCycle]

These things suck up more juice and make more noise and heat than it's worth for a home miner, but for those with the space and money to do it professionally without taking down a power grid... they can be very lucrative. However as a home miner running GPU's myself, I hope it takes them a while to release them, and I hope they are quite limited in supply until us GPU miners can move on to something else haha.

[QuorTek]

The big question... will this divert the buy of GFX cards to this product instead? Or is re-sell factor still a thing?

[Spreadie]

The big question... will this divert the buy of GFX cards to this product instead? Or is re-sell factor still a thing?

Mining is almost irrelevant at this point - Scalpers will pounce on whatever product is in demand, be it hangbags, shoes or GPUs. Materials shortages and mining helped create the demand for GPUs but the scalpers are perpetuating it by dint of not moving on to another product and, as long is there is demand, prices will remain high. If miners moved to ASICs for ETH, I'll bet scalpers would take up the slack immediately - there is enough latent demand to keep it going until next year.

I seriously doubt things will get back to normal unless there is a new Cabbage Patch craze or something to divert their attention.