First post, by RedCharles
So last September I saw 2080 Ti's going for a little less than 600 bucks on fleabay. And I thought no way. I'm gonna wait. Prices are going to get better. 3000s and 6000s are just around the corner. So I bought a 1080 Ti FTW3 for the third time for $400 (I change up graphics cards a lot) to hold me over until January. And I'm thinking, ya I'm gonna lose on this one, but I really want to play MFS on my TV, and I'm willing to eat a $100 dollar loss when I sell it after Christmas.
And in January, I'm feeling restless, and sad, and depressed, so go buy myself a G9 240hz. Then I find out I need DSC compression to run at 240hz, and only 2018 and newer cards have DSC. And so I'm looking for card again and it's unbelievable. Not only are the new cards unobtainable, even 5700xt's are going for $600. Crazy town. I'm checking ETH. I'm checking zerohedge. I'm checking Elon's tweets. I'm checking JPM. They say BTC 146k. ETH is headed up and up. No end in sight and no doubt about it. And I decide, this is only going to get worse. So I find an ad on ebay for 2080 Ti. Guy lives the next town over. I start talking to him, and ebay's wise to what I'm doing, but I do it anyway. I talk the guy down a hundred bucks. Got it for $850 face to face. Could not believe I was paying that for a used 2080 Ti, but the guy wouldn't take a penny less. On the upside, he was willing to deliver and help me transfer the warranty over and all that. Cool guy. He actually hung around for an hour and we talked. It was kind of sad actually. Everybody's lonely. Isolated. It's depressing.
After owning the G9 for a month I realized I no longer play games on my 75TV at all. And I've got a Ryzen 3600 1080 Ti system just sitting in there collecting dust. So I sell the mobo cpu ram case nvme to a friend who's still rocking a X58 Xeon 1080 Ti build. And I'm bringing my own x58 out of retirement to replace the 3600 build. And I could plug the 108o Ti in there and run it with a 980x, and that's not a bad system. That could probably run modded Skyrim SE and MFS well enough at 4k. And it is cool to chill on the couch and play MFS with the kids every now and then. But there's another part me, that sees that 1080 Ti's are going for $800 bucks on ebay. And the 1080Ti I've got is still under warranty. Might even go for more than 800. And then I could just wait, troll stores, buy a bot and maybe score a 6800XT or 3080 later this year for retail.
And maybe BTC and ETH will become too successful. And threaten the petro dollar. And then the USG will go to war with crypto currencies and shut them down with extreme prejudice.
And hell maybe sky's the limit. Maybe I should wait another month. I'm leery of selling on fleabay, I do it, but I hate it. I sold a Vega 64 LC for $350 in January on CL, and I'm kind of regretting it. They're going for over $600 now. But at the same time. Who is buying these things? I saw two 1080 Ti's locally on CL this week. They're both gone. Somebody bought them. Was it desperate gamer? Or coin farmer?
Radeon VII's were selling for $550 new last April. I know. I bought one. Vega 64 LC just wasn't cutting it at 4k. And I used the R7 to get steady frames in modded Skyrim at 4k. Beat Skyrim. Stopped playing games for a bit. Sold for the R7 for $850 a few months later on ebay. And at the time, I thought, no way these prices keep going up. There's got to be a breaking point for video cards where the cost of ETH and the cost of GPU's separate. But Radeon VII's are going for over $2000 now.
Even 750 Ti's are being dragged up in price. I bought one for 50 bucks last October. Sold the same one for 80 in January.
The 2080 Ti I bought in January for $850 was going for over $1000 on ebay two days ago.
ETH may hit 10,000 this year. It may go bust again. And I'm hoping it busts again, but I'm leaning towards 10k considering all the USD inflation I'm seeing in commodities such as lumber and copper and the general scarcity I see in finished goods such as washing machines and computer parts. Although, interestingly enough gold has gone up, but it's not even close to same trajectory it was on in 2008. The news talks about BTC all day, but BTC has only gone up 800%, whereas ETH is up almost 2000%. Part of me wonders if this is like the Tulip Mania of 1637 which my English professor ranted on and on about it while we were reading Zeno's Conscience. BOA seems to think so. They said BTC was the mother of all bubbles. And another part of me wonders if we're witnessing a kind of revolution in currency, where all of the false, heavily manipulated government issued currencies will be supplanted by BTC and other crypto currencies.
What are your thoughts? What's going to happen?