Last post of the year, and I want to talk about two things that have nothing to do with each other except that they happened to me during the same three weeks: I could not buy a graphics card to save my life, and Bitcoin has been sitting there in a browser tab climbing every single day like it forgot how to stop.
Start with the card. My nephew turns fifteen in January and all he wanted was an RTX 3080 for the PC his dad helped him build over the summer. Simple enough, right? Except the 3080 launched back in September at $699 and by the time I started looking in early December it might as well have been vapor. Best Buy does these restock drops where you have to be logged in and refreshing at some specific hour, I heard 9am worked for someone once, and the whole thing sells out in about four minutes to bots that flip the card on eBay for $1,100 or $1,300 the same afternoon. I tried three times. Got as far as an "add to cart" button that then told me the item was no longer available, which is a special kind of insulting when it happens twice in one week.
I ended up getting him a 3060 Ti instead, ordered from a random regional electronics site I'd never heard of before, paid $50 over MSRP and felt weirdly grateful about it. Not the card he wanted. He'll live.
Here's the part that's been nagging at me though. While all this was happening I kept a second tab open with Bitcoin's price in it, mostly out of morbid curiosity because I bought a tiny bit back in 2013 for basically nothing and then sold most of it in 2015 to cover rent, which is its own separate source of low-grade regret I won't get into. It crashed to under $5,000 back in March when everything crashed, and now here it is on December 31st sitting around $28,000, up something like six times in nine months. People are calling it a new all-time high almost weekly at this point.
And I don't think those two things are unrelated, even if nobody's saying it outright. GPUs mine crypto. When the price goes up, more people who own a rig full of cards decide it's worth running them flat out again instead of leaving them idle, and some of the shortage that's genuinely about chip supply and COVID production slowdowns and just plain demand for the PS5 and Series X gets tangled up with mining demand too. I'm not saying it's the whole story, Nvidia itself has said the bottleneck is mostly manufacturing and yield, but when your problem is "everyone wants this specific object and there aren't enough of them," a resurgent bull market for the thing that also wants that object doesn't help.
What I actually find funny is how disconnected the two experiences felt while they were happening. Checking Bitcoin is passive, it's a number going up on a screen I have no control over and honestly no real stake in anymore. Hunting a GPU is active and infuriating and involves alarms set for odd hours and a Discord server full of strangers screaming "IT'S UP AT MICRO CENTER" in all caps at 6:47am. One of those things made me money nothing and the other one cost me actual sleep, and yet by some weird chain of second-order effects they're touching the same supply chain.
Anyway. My nephew opens his present in a week since we're doing Christmas late this year because of everything going on, and I already know he's going to be polite about the 3060 Ti and then quietly ask his dad if they can maybe upgrade later. Kid's not wrong to want the better card. I just wish wanting it wasn't a competitive sport against a bot farm and, apparently, whatever's happening in the crypto markets right now.
2020's almost done. I won't pretend I'm sad to see it go.