Remember when GPU price and availability was an issue because they were being bought en masse to mine Bitcoin? Well, it would be weird if you forgot, because it never stopped. Despite the massive slump in recent months, Bitcoin is slowly regaining its value due to… reasons. Many Bitcoin ventures didn't make it to the other side of the slump, and those that did, incurred massive losses and debt – like Stronghold Digital Mining, for instance.
As spotted by Tom's Hardware, SDIG recently released its financial report, which revealed that the company has to sell off 26,200 Bitcoin mining rigs in order to recoup debt worth $67.4 million.
"On August 16, 2022, Stronghold entered into an agreement with NYDIG ABL LLC (“NYDIG”) and another participating lender to eliminate all $67.4 million outstanding under the equipment financing agreements with these lenders and consensually return approximately 26,200 Bitcoin miners (approximately 18,700 of which are currently operating) with hash rate capacity of approximately 2.5 exahash per second (“EH/s”), freeing up the related fully developed data center slots," said the report.
The Bitcoin market has stabilized to a certain extent recently. While it certainly isn't at the high it once was, the downward plummet has at least ended. With this, GPU prices have also come down to reasonable levels, although availability is still an issue – partly because crypto companies had high demand, and also due to the global microprocessor shortage.
Many of the video game companies, especially marketplaces, like Steam, have prevented the use of cryptocurrency due to the risk of fraud. "The problem is that a lot of the actors who are in that space are not people you want interacting with your customers," said Gabe Newell on the topic. "We had problems when we started accepting cryptocurrencies as a payment option. 50 percent of those transactions were fraudulent which is a mind-boggling number. These were customers we didn't want to have."
Newell is of the opinion that while blockchain technology is an interesting technology with massive scope, the use case scenarios still need to be figured out and implemented properly.