Cryptocurrency mining has been a hot topic this last year, and became ever more prevalent when the global chip shortage already limited the amount of GPUs out in the wild, and with miners snatching up every piece of graphical horsepower prices skyrocketed way beyond typical MSRP.

Thankfully, there is a silver lining though, as the recent Chinese crypto crackdown has seen a major impact on the world of cryptocurrencies and miners. The Chinese government recently cracked down on crypto mining in a lot of regions due to their low energy costs, which meant miners quickly set up dozens of farming operations that ended up using a ton of resources.

There are other things China is doing to crack down on crypto, but the point is it has had a dramatic impact on the popularity of crypto mining, so much so that the overall processing power going into Ethereum (a type of cryptocurrency) has dropped by 19%, which is only good news for PC gamers.

Thanks to Etherscan, we can actually see the total hash rate of the Ethereum network - which essentially represents the total amount of power going into mining this particular cryptocurrency - and how much it has dropped recently because of the crackdown.

We’ve already seen the knock-on effect this has had on the graphics card market, as Chinese crypto miners have begun selling off their second-hand GPUs close to MSRP value, and has brought the popularity of GPUs down so cards in Germany for instance have hit their lowest prices since February 2021.

What does this mean for the rest of the world then? Well, hopefully it means we’ll start to see graphics cards return to MSRP in the next few months, though it might take longer since businesses have profited a lot from the inflated prices, and so will want to take it slow in order to prevent as many losses from their profit margins.

Then again, this could just be a dip in the recent cryptocurrency boom, and we’ll see the same thing happen again soon. If that does happen, hopefully it will be a few years from now and not a few months, because we should start seeing graphics cards at MSRP by the end of the year at this rate.

What do you think? Are we in a short lull for the cryptocurrency boom? Will it happen again soon? Or a few years from now? And do you think we’ll start to see GPU prices at MSRP by the end of the year? Or will it take longer? Or even shorter? Let us know your thoughts!