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Did I make it harder to sell your crappy, used crypto mining graphics card? Good

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Crypto mining is a plague. If I made someone less likely to cryptomine, I’ve left the world a little better off than I found it.
There are two things that are guaranteed to get you hate mail in this business: being a woman online with an opinion, and criticizing crypto. The piece I wrote earlier this week dissuading readers from buying a used graphics card right now seems to have hit a nerve with many in the crypto community, and it was utterly predictable. With crypto miners buying up all the best graphics cards to endlessly run ether hashing algorithms, there’s been nary a GPU for the many gamers out there, even to the point that Nvidia was forced to implement new software and hardware tricks to try to limit the hash rate of their graphics cards to make more supply available to gamers who were left out in the cold. Even that effort was stymied by crypto miners hell-bent on easy money at the expense of the environment. So now that the crypto bubble has popped and everyone is scrambling to sell the graphics cards they spent thousands of dollars on in an attempt to break even, some did not take kindly to my suggestion that the best possible outcome is that crypto miners get absolutely soaked. Again, understandable, but as FDR once said, they are unanimous in their hate for me (according to my DMs and inbox), and I welcome their hatred. TechRadar is a consumer product site, and our focus here is to make sure that everything you buy is the best purchase for you. A used graphics card just isn’t a good purchase right now. I said so, and I have no interest in making it easier for a lot of shady crypto miners to sell their worn-out GPUs by holding my tongue on this. My interest is our entire readership, and given current inflation and cost-of-living issues, a lot of readers might be tempted to buy a used RTX 3080. I advised them that they might be buying a lemon and that there’s no way to tell a good card from a bad one. Given the nature of the crypto space, there are a lot of ne’er-do-wells out there who will happily sell someone a card on its last leg while wrapping it up like it’s brand new. Six months to a year from now when the card craps out, the seller will be long gone and there’s no getting that money back. That reader is out serious money and now they have to buy another card. Sorry, my interest is in helping that reader not get screwed, and I will not apologize for that. As for all of your „criticisms“, let’s go over some of the highlights. You simply can’t tell the amount of internal wear on these cards and you don’t know how much useful life they have left in them. There are no odometers. There’s a higher than normal chance that you’re going to spend a lot of money on a card that won’t last nearly as long as you expect given the price you’re paying for it. Ultimately, you may end up spending a lot more money in the long run, maybe even more than if you just bought a new, more expensive card. One thing several cryptocomplainers have messaged me is to argue that crypto mining has been proven – proven! – to not damage a graphics card. Poppycock. I’ve spent years studying computer science, including computer architecture, and GPUs aren’t made of pixie dust and rainbows, they’re made of physical silicon, with lithographed transistors and other nanoscopic components whose widths are measurable in numbers of atoms. An electrical current passing through that silicon gradually change the character and physical structures of these components. It wears them down and, eventually, they fail. As transistors get smaller and smaller, these sometimes-quantum-level effects matter more and more as the transistors are that much more sensitive owing to their size. Don’t believe me? Here’s an IEEE report (opens in new tab) on the effects of electrical current on the breakdown of silicon nanostructures. Since crypto miners want Hard Evidence of this phenomenon, here’s a peer-reviewed article called „Asymmetric aging effect on modern microprocessors“ from the engineering journal Microelectronics Reliability (opens in new tab) that you can read to gain some insight into how electronics break down over time with use. Or, you can Google „transistor aging (opens in new tab)“ and read any number of dozens of engineering papers on the topic. For all those out there claiming that graphics cards should last more than a decade, the automotive and healthcare industries have the most stringent reliability demands of any microprocessor consumer (opens in new tab), and their chips are rated for 10 to 15 years of reliable service before they start to fail. Graphics cards are nowhere near that level. It is simply the case that the more and/or the longer electrical current passes through a transistor, the quicker it fails. This is basic electrical engineering. This isn’t shilling for graphics card makers, it’s just reality. Graphics cards aren’t singularities freed from the constraints of chemistry and physics.

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