SETI: miners’ demand made impossible for us to buy new video cards

News reports suggest that SETI needs video cards to process waves on all imaginable frequency bands to find anomalous signals which might possibly be of alien origin. Now they have a limited ability to buy more, and all this because of miners.

“We've got the money, we've contacted the vendors, and they say, 'We just don't have them”, informs one of the scientists in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence center.

Quite possibly, other research facilities are now dealing with the same issue, especially if they are not backed by the state. For example, Russian Sberbank has lately bought a big supply of video cards for their artificial intelligence research, but due to the fact that the organization is backed by the authorities, they had no supply delays. Meanwhile, usual miners and gamers in the same country often see empty shelves for GPUs in the stores and joke about it.

The SETI scientists are on the bad side of the usual market process when the increased demand leads to shortages in supply. This situation might change in the future when the mining difficulty of Bitcoin becomes so high that not even 20 high-end modern ASICs would be able to mine a single Bitcoin efficiently.