People are not mining Bitcoin on videocards.

But BTC price influences all crypto. Read it as “ETH hits $5k” if that matters.

That would suck in the short term, but it would also be a HUGE incentive to massively ramp up chip fabrication capacity, leading to long term cost decrease due to economies of scale.

What ML card are you buying that is only $200 over its gaming equivalent?

I don’t, that was a blind guess that missed. Insert a real extra and compare to the prospect of crypto prices rising and nvidia doing nothing. What would ML people gain from that while gamers lose all?

Yeah, the ML example doesn't really work because we're already paying through the nose for the privilege of running GPU's in production processes. This development is really nothing new, Nvidia and ATI (and Intel and AMD) have always charged extra for their "professional" lineups usually enforced through software alone or even just the EULA.