So Elon tweeted Wednesday night that Tesla now takes Bitcoin straight through checkout, no converter, no middleman, you just pay and drive off in whatever's left of your coin stack. By Thursday morning it was the only thing on tech Twitter. Everybody who bought in back when a coin cost about as much as a value meal was doing their little victory lap, and honestly, good for them. I'm not bitter about that part. If I'd bought a few hundred bucks of Bitcoin in 2013 instead of a mechanical keyboard I don't even use anymore, I'd probably be tweeting too.
What I actually want to talk about is what all this crypto money sloshing around is doing to people who just want to play video games on a normal computer.
Regulars here already know the saga. I've been trying to get a graphics card since basically the day the RTX 3080 launched back in September, and it has been, without exaggeration, the worst consumer experience I've had trying to buy anything in years. MSRP on the 3080 is $699. Go look at eBay right now and tell me what they're actually selling for — I saw one close last night at $1,469, and that wasn't even an outlier, that was just Tuesday's price. The 3070 is supposed to be $499. Good luck.
Nvidia tried to do something about it. Back in February they put out the RTX 3060 with a hash rate limiter baked in, the whole pitch being it'd cut Ethereum mining performance in half so miners wouldn't bother buying up the gaming cards. Card launched February 25th. Sold out in what felt like four minutes, same as everything else, because it turns out half the mining performance of a card that pays for itself in a few months is still a card that pays for itself in a few months, just slower. Miners did not care. I don't think anyone seriously expected them to.
I've had a Best Buy tab open every morning this week at 8:55, refreshing like it's a part time job, because restocks tend to land right around 9. Monday there was nothing. Wednesday there was a 3060 Ti listed for about ninety seconds before it vanished into someone's cart — and I'd bet real money it wasn't a person's cart, it was a script's cart. There are whole Discord servers now just for coordinating restock bots and sneaker-style checkout scripts, except instead of shoes it's video cards, which feels like a genuinely new kind of stupid that 2021 invented.
So yeah, forgive me if the big Tesla news lands a little flat over here. Somewhere out there a guy just bought a car with money that partly exists because a machine somewhere is doing math problems, and I still can't get a $329 card at its actual $329 price to run a five year old game at more than 45 frames a second. My current rig is still running a GTX 1070 I bought used off a coworker in 2018, and it is doing an honestly heroic job for how old it is, but heroic isn't the same as good.
I'll say this though, because I don't think I've said it plainly on here before: I don't think Bitcoin as a payment method for a $40,000 car is actually the interesting part of this story. Almost nobody paying that way is doing it because they need a car, they're doing it because it's a fun way to realize a gain without technically selling. The interesting part is upstream of that, it's the mining, it's the fact that an entire category of consumer electronics got quietly reclassified as an investment vehicle sometime in the last year and nobody sent out a memo. Nvidia's earnings call is going to be something to watch. I'd genuinely like to know what percentage of 30-series cards sold since launch have ever run a single game.
Anyway. If anyone local has a line on a 3070 at anything close to retail, I am not too proud to ask. I've got cash, I've got patience wearing thin, and apparently I've also got a car company that'll take my money in a currency I don't own instead.