Well, if they are being bought for PoW mining there is a good chance that they would then become more expensive for other uses. It is not like we have solar panels just laying around and nobody tough of using them before PoW came along.

Hmm, I'm not so sure about that. To me it seems much more like the increased demand has generated a lot of competition and that got prices way down from the levels just 5-10 years ago.

And that is exactly why we should base plans and decisions on the actual facts we are sure about and can measure and verify and provide citations to prove, not just our feelings about how things seem and how we wish the ideal world worked in our childish libertarian fantasies and get-rich-quick pyramid schemes.

So where's your data? I bought a pretty large solar array by adding a panel or two over the years. It's so big now that I have more than enough energy to sell/mine BTC even in winter - and that's for a large old EU-style village house and I like to shower in hot water a lot and keep 24 degrees (admittedly, I use a little coal the week/two it's -20 outside), and I don't even have new windows - still these 100 year old wooden ones - nor modern insulation (my ceiling is insulated with >50 year old straw, lol).

Today it's possible to buy a shipping container full of incredibly efficient solar panels for just around 8k EUR and have it delivered the same month. If that's not cheap and available I don't know what is - and it definitely wasn't this good 5 years ago, not even playing the same game.

5 years ago I had to talk to a sales rep who wanted to visit me and do special deals (and tried to bag the difference from grid costs through their shit leasing), now I just order on an eshop, pay with card and it's done in 15 minutes. My last shipment last year arrived within a week after ordering, now it's worse because of the Russian war - but that applies to everything related to energy, and there are new companies trying to cater to this new market already, it just takes some time to ramp up.

Each year the availability, efficiency and price of solar panels improved for me. You're claiming it got worse because of crypto - based on what? To me, your snark seems just like a childish socialist fantasy and anti-money/market scheme, and the reality starkly disagrees.

I'm happy if you want to pay to shower with hot water. I'm not going to pay you to shower with hot water.

I'm not paying for it, I have my own solar arrays. And after I am finished I'll redirect the unused energy to BTC mining again - the grid pays less than half of what I get from mining. Nobody's business.

Same as people were free to buy graphics cards for gaming in the last couple of years?

Are you suggesting the high-end semiconductor shortage was caused by crypto? I don't think so. When you have Apple buying out the entire 5nm TSMC capacity for a year/more - in direct competition with NVidia, it's a hard proposition to make. And it's not like the GPU vendors were unhappy about the high prices and/or tried hard to get more production capacity.

BTW you don't mine Bitcoin with GPUs, that's impossible for at least 5+ years now. Bitcoin is mined with ASICs that are using older production nodes (+-30nm and the like).

The semiconductor shortage? No. The GPU shortage, and the insane prices also due to scalpers abusing the shortage?

100%. yes.

Shall we pretend you replied in good faith to a post asking "Same as people were free to buy graphics cards for gaming in the last couple of years?", genuinely misunderstood the question, genuinely missing the "graphics card" and thought only of the general semiconductor shortage in your answer?

100% no. I call your bullshit.

Well my point is, you make GPUs in the same factory where you make CPUs and networking chips. So first have a look at what happened there - e.g. a massive new client has appeared and booked out the entire capacity that usually Nvidia and AMD were getting. Are you saying this 100% surely had zero impact?

And again, I was talking about Bitcoin, and you don't mine it with GPUs, and ASICs don't compete with GPU production capacity. So who replies in bad faith? I'm happy to believe the other commenter genuinely missed me talking about Bitcoin, so I mentioned it again. Then you come here with your attack...

Fair point about Apple buying out the output of TSMC's 5nm line - but Nvidia used Samsung's 8nm process. One could argue some orders were displaced due to TSMC being booked out, thus crowding Samsung's capacity as a cascade effect, driving prices up, or that Nvidia would have used a different process or booked capacity on both factories if it was possible.... but on the other hand Apple likely financed the entire 5nm line (it's pretty much in line with their operational model and they did it in the past - although I'm writing with no evidence it took place in this specific occasion), so an argument could be made that such 5nm line wouldn't have even existed for a further year or 2 hadn't Apple basically paid for it.

I don't know precisely what's the net impact of all of the above, but I have reasonable suspicion it it pales compared to the miner-induced shortage (which enabled scalping - it would have hardly made sense otherwise).

And while I agree bitcoin hasn't used GPU mining in ages, you were replying to a graphics card related question, and the entire thread is about Ethereum PoW (GPU mined) being sunset with this merge.

I first replied with the hot water comment, the reply to the GPU question wasn't my first comment here.

Fair point too, and I had missed that, sorry.

I personally know people who were successfully mining crypto using GPUs in the last couple of years. If it was Bitcoin, Ethereum or Doge, I don't know and it doesn't matter to me. As soon as the crypto prices came down this year, they sold their GPU collection. So saying that miners used only ASICs is not true.

Yes, there was a semiconductor shortage, but miners made the situation worse for others because they each used tens of GPUs instead of just one as a normal person would for gaming or graphics work.

My friends who have an AI company bought out these miners by the dozen and are running it for training - and yes they got it by offering more money than gamers and buying the whole lot, so gamers got the short stick again.

Why is that not bad? I don't see where the value for society got so much better, if that's the measure you're using - I'd rather have someone run the Ethereum blockchain than generate catgirl porn pictures. But even that is IMHO more useful than a bunch of guys gaming, at least more people get to feel the effect of a GPU than if it was owned by a gamer and only ever used for his eye candy. Games also could simply use the available resources better and then the gamers wouldn't need such absurdly overpowered hardware.

Overall, I think we shouldn't be measuring usage of GPUs, solar panels or any other products like this and definitely shouldn't be saying who has a right to have it and who doesn't, or for what prices - that gets us into nasty situations with only nasty answers.

This is a product like any other, gamers don't have any right to get cheap GPUs. Somebody else offered more money for it and the vendor didn't take the low-end market - that's just how it is.