I would avoid getting into the cryptocurrency game at this point. Shit is basically a pyramid scheme.hanselthecaretaker said:Bad Jim said:The price of Bitcoin and various other crytpocurrencies has gone up nearly 10X this year. I know this because I got $75 in Bitcoin this year, let it sit on my account for months and now I can afford a graphics card. Obviously the increased price means plenty of incentive to mine cryptocurrencies.
Another development has been Ethereum, a relatively popular currency now which cannot be efficiently mined with ASICs, the most efficient way to mine it is with GPUs. Apparently this is by design. They wanted the average PC user to be able to mine it, not just businesses running rooms full of ASICs. Personally I'd rather have cheap graphics cards, but that's what they did.
There is some debate on whether cryptocurrency is itself a bubble or the future of currency, but the recent upswing looks a lot like a bubble. My prediction is that mining operations will ramp up, prices will fall, speculators will be butthurt and PC gaming will once again be affordable.
In the meantime, consider mining currencies yourself. Maybe not a full scale mining operation, but you could buy a 1060 for gaming and mine Ethereum with it when you aren't playing games, which should help offset the cost.
Does everyone who mines (even the little guys) end up benefiting though? In the economist link above it sounds like more of a "whoever crosses the finish line first" takes all, which is why there are people with room fulls of daisy-chained GPU's at twice or more than the cost they're worth and the smaller guys are giving up.
It would definitely make more sense if all contributors benefited, but who really knows what the true intentions of its creator were. To avoid a situation like that link described, and to remain truly decentralized, it almost seems like a contribution cap needs to be put in place to prevent abuse.