Others continue to mine despite the lower profits.

The ‘price fever’ of bitcoin, ethereum (ETH) and other virtual currencies in the last several months has led to a new investment wave. 

People are talking about how to do business with virtual currencies everywhere, from cafes to pavements and Facebook.

Vietnamese players have two ways to make money, either buying for reselling when the prices go up, or mining bitcoins themselves with computers with strong configurations. 

The ‘price fever’ of bitcoin, ethereum (ETH) and other virtual currencies in the last several months has led to a new investment wave.

Computers need VGA (graphics card) to mine bitcoins. A system of mining machines uses 4-6 VGAs. 

As a result, people have rushed to buy graphics cards, causing a shortage of graphic cards to sell to normal computer users.

Some dealers have imported VGAs in large quantities from China, but they have sold VGAs in big lots of tens of products to bitcoin miners, contributing to the shortage.

Some computer shops had to refuse to sell VGAs to virtual currency miners because they could not provide a warranty for the products.

As the products were in short supply, the prices soared by hundreds of thousands of dong or millions of dong.

MSI GTX 1060 6 GB, for example, priced at VND6 million in international market, was retailed at VND8 million in Vietnam.

HIS RX 460 OC 4GB DDR5 128 bit saw the price increasing from VND3.3 million to VND3.8 million and Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4G from VND3.9 million to VND4.7 million.

Computer shop owners confirmed that the VGA supply has become more plentiful recently. 

Asus and Colorful have launched VGAs specifically used to mine bitcoins with high performance and low power consumption. The prices of bitcoins and ETH have tended to decrease.

CNBC reported that days ago, ETH unexpectedly crashed from $319 to 10 cents in a second on the GDAX cryptocurrency exchange, a move blamed on a ‘multimillion dollar market sell’ order.

“The error on GDAX, the increased difficulty level in mining, and the fact that RX 470 now can create $16 per day have prompted miners to rush to sell mining machines,” said Nguyen Toan, a digital currency player in HCMC.

Meanwhile, Nguyen Van Toan, a player from Bac Ninh, said some people were trying to sell mining machines because the machines have turned too old and are not strong enough to be used for mining. 

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