That's incredible, I remember when it was impossible to get ASIC miners from ButterflyLabs and we were all up in arms because of their inappropriate behavior. That was a niche vendor producing items that had basically no other uses.

GPU makers didn't sign up to build machines that print money. But it turns out when you do make machines that can print money, people tend to buy them at a rate faster than you can make them! Right away, whether or not you did it on purpose.

(I did get my ASIC Jalapeño miners from BFL before they were busted up, I did order more when they came around and offered to let everyone order more, and I still did manage to earn a pittance over and above my initial investment on both batches, regardless of the absolutely ridiculous production and shipping delays.)

My recollection of how Bitcoin turned out indicates that most of those people will not make money. That, in fact, the simple rules of how markets work mean that most cannot make money, on several counts:

* Those with resources will have an edge, and will buy an optimal number of GPUs to get return before the price is driven down

* Anyone without resources will not be able to mine quickly enough to get a return before the price is driven down

* If the market were still lucrative, the GPU makers would not be selling all of their stock, which means it is a near certainty that either the GPU makers or someone with connections has already snapped up a healthy share

* Worse, the more lucrative it is, the more quickly ASIC makers will release ASICs which make those GPU investments all but worthless for mining.

All of this means that anyone contemplating whether they should get into mining already has their answer: "no".

That's not quite accurate. You can get Nvidia stuff, sometimes at MSRP, sometimes a little over. It's the AMD hardware that's impossible to find.

Huh? I saw several 1080s and 1080 TIs in stock at a local Microcenter in New York just two days ago. Which GPUs are specifically used for mining?