As we like to say in our SecureWorld newsroom, "It's all about the crypto."
Here is more proof, and this time, none of it got hacked or stolen—that we know of, anyway.
Instead, the mining frenzy is driving up prices in the GPU market as cryptocurrency miners spent hundreds of millions of dollars on GPUs (graphics processing units) in 2017.
Tech Republic has a good write-up on this one:
"Cryptocurrency miners bought some 3 million GPUs in 2017, totaling $776 million, according to a recent report from Jon Peddie Research (JPR). Miners use the parallel processing power of GPUs to collect currencies like Bitcoin, Monero, Ethereum, and more.
While the sales are good news for GPU manufacturers, they're impacting other industries in negative ways. The rise of cryptocurrency mining led to GPU shortages that have impacted PC gaming, graphic designers, and even researchers looking for alien life. The shortage has caused secondhand prices to skyrocket, rising by hundreds of dollars in many cases."
As long as we're talking about cryptocurrency (again), you might be interested to read a new article in Money Magazine. It claims cryptocurrency will replace national currencies by 2030.
Stay tuned.
We'll know more about that in another decade.