For most of a decade, mid-range and high-end gaming GPUs were essentially impossible to buy at sane prices. Anyone trying to build a PC in 2020 or 2021 ran into walls of "out of stock" listings and scalper markups. Then Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake, and overnight the economic case for GPU mining of the world's biggest GPU-mined coin disappeared.

What happened to the cards

The big farms liquidated first. Pallets of RTX 3060, RTX 3070, RTX 3080, RX 6700 XT, and RX 6800 cards hit marketplaces, often with their original boxes and accessories. Smaller operators followed. Within a year, the cost of capable mining-class GPUs collapsed to a fraction of their retail price.

Why this matters for Malairte

Malairte is a CPU and GPU mineable coin with no ASIC. That means the same hardware that mined Ethereum can mine Malairte. The used market is not just cheap; it is full of exactly the right kind of card for what we are doing.

An RTX 3060 12GB is roughly the sweet spot. It has enough VRAM, plenty of memory bandwidth for the workload, sips power compared to its bigger siblings, and trades hands at prices that simply did not exist for this class of card before 2023.

The caveats are real

Used does not mean problem-free. Cards that mined Ethereum for years often need new thermal pads (especially RTX 3080 and 3090 variants), fresh paste on the GPU die, and sometimes a fan replacement. None of this is hard, but it is real labour and a real cost. A card sold for half retail with tired thermals can quickly become a card that cost you "half retail plus eighty dollars in pads and two evenings of disassembly."

How to buy well in this market

  • Pick a known model from a major brand: ASUS, MSI, EVGA, Gigabyte, Sapphire, PowerColor
  • Ask for HWiNFO memory junction screenshots
  • Boot test before you pay
  • Budget for a repad and repaste from day one
  • Be patient: this market is soft, and walking away from a bad deal is free

The bigger picture

For the first time in a decade, the people most likely to mine a new coin at home — gamers, PC builders, tinkerers — have access to capable hardware at hobby prices. That accessibility is part of what makes Malairte's CPU-and-GPU model interesting. The barrier to entry is not "buy a $5,000 ASIC and wire it into a 240V outlet." It is "spend a weekend setting up the PC you might have built anyway."