I made the mistake of checking Coinbase on my phone last night, in bed, right before I was supposed to be falling asleep. Dont do that. I havent looked at the app in probably three weeks and in that time Bitcoin has basically fallen off a cliff: it was sitting north of $6,300 not even a week ago and tonight its hovering just above five grand, which if youve been anywhere near this stuff since 2017 you know is not where anyone wanted it to be.
Ive written about crypto on here before, usually with some amount of eye-rolling, so I dont think anyone's shocked that Im not panicking. But its still a weird feeling watching a number that used to represent "maybe I can pay off my car" slide down into "well, that was a fun two years." Ethereum and Litecoin are down right alongside it, because thats how this always goes — one thing drops and the whole board follows, like theyre all tied to the same string.
Heres my actual confession though: I still have the graphics card. Late 2017, at the absolute worst possible time, I bought a GTX 1070 specifically to mess around with mining, because a guy at work wouldnt shut up about it and I figured what's the harm in one card. I never even hooked it up properly for more than a few weekends — the fan noise alone nearly drove me out of my own office, and my electricity bill jumped enough that my wife asked what exactly I was running in there. So mostly it just sat there being a very expensive way to play games at higher framerates, which, fine, I got some use out of it that way. But every time one of these crash headlines pops up I think about that card and feel a little dumb all over again.
What actually gets me isnt the price, its the whining. Every crypto forum and every comment section right now is full of people insisting this is exactly like every other dip and its going straight back up any day now, mixed in with people insisting the whole thing was always a scam and they knew it the entire time. Neither group seems to have any more information than I do. Nobody does. Thats sort of the whole problem with an asset whose value is basically just vibes and whoever's willing to buy it off you next.
I dont think this kills crypto as a concept, for what its worth. People said that in early 2018 too, back when it dropped from $19k and everyone declared it dead, and here we are a year later still talking about it, just at a worse number. But Im also not one of the people telling my coworkers to "buy the dip" right now, because I genuinely dont know if five grand is the dip or just a stop on the way further down. Anyone who tells you they do know is guessing with extra confidence.
The other thing I keep noticing is how quiet the mining subreddits have gotten compared to a year ago. Back when this started there were daily posts about rig builds, guys with six-GPU setups running in their garages, spreadsheets calculating exact break-even points down to the kilowatt-hour. Now its mostly people asking if its worth it to sell their cards used, and other people telling them the used GPU market is already flooded because everyone else had the same idea at the same time. Supply and demand doesnt care how attached you were to the idea.
Anyway. My 1070 stays in the machine. Its a decent card for Overwatch even if it never made me a dime mining anything, and at this point pulling it out and selling it for whatever the going rate is on eBay feels more like admitting defeat than anything financially smart. Sometimes you just keep the thing.
Not sure what Ill be writing about the next time this number moves, up or down. Given the last two years of this stuff, I wouldnt bet on it staying still for long.