Re: Sponsored by power companies?
"Note: this may have changed recently with the surge in prices of coins, but for a long time it cost more in power than you got in coins for all but the most specialised hardware. "
For the last 5 years that's not been the case. Even if you mine and flog them right off the bat, missing all these 1000% returns, it's still been profitable to mine on a graphics card, in a high 'leccy cost country.
For something like Litecoin, which is now pretty much only profitable when mined by the latest generation of ASICs, there was a period wher the first gen ASICs where being built, pre-sold, and then eventually delivered. I was using R9 270 cards to mine then, which had a ROI of between nine and twelve months. They are still marginally profitable ($3 income profit from $2 of power over 24 hours), and have made $4 from $1 for about another year when they where mining Etherium. I could even flog them for about 50 euro now, and they cost me 150 new. On average (according to my sad git spreadsheet) they made me a euro a day net profit over the course of three years. Power here is 0.21 euro a kwh.
So even for a now ASIC only coin, non-specialized hardware is profitable a certain points in it's life. For any coin that is designed to make ASICs prohibitively expensive relative to a CPU or GPU (Monero) or is still waiting on ASIC miners to be delivered you can still make bank.
For current graphics cards, Nvidia 10xx series are pretty much the best bang for buck, albeit not being that cheap. A tuned 1060 is 280-330, and should do 3-4 euro in income for about 4.5 kwh, the others are multiples (1070 x1.5, 1080ti x2.25).
"Which is why we can't have nice things (like graphics cards) for Xmas."
According to the GPU manufacturers, 3-4% of their sales are to miners versus gamers, down from 6%*. This is broadly backed up by what the pool mining rates have been. So either other factors where to blame for supply shortages (that also affected all other IT kit), or the suppliers used the crunch to bump prices. Or an increase of 3% in sales somehow clears all the 200-400 euro cards.
Now nVidia cards are back to their pre-crunch prices, and AMD have re-jigged their range to make 8Gb models more pricey, which implies that it was the cost/availability of GDDR5 memory that was more of an influence than anything else.
The manufacturers also manage to ignore what miners want when they designed their "mining card". Generally faster/better RAM is the biggest kicker, along with a backplate for cooling and cost. Didn't get either of any of these things, cost was the same, but you only got 30 days rather than 2 year warranty. You are much better off buying a gaming series card, which has a decent resale value, as well as better RAM, cooling and better chance of winning the silicon lottery.
*nVidia reckons $1.5 Bn in slaes to gamers, 50 mil to miners, down from 75 mil.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
