Mining has been around for years but a combination of several factors, including mining are what has caused shortages and high prices for GPUs. I know people who set up mining sheds in their backyards with several racks of graphics cards - 10s of thousands of $ for the setup. It's easy to assume that this isnt an isolated behavior for a few people. It's the mining craze of the last couple years that is the mining portion of the shortages and price increases. The people who built those sheds didnt build them in 2018, but in 2020 and 2021. Once this started to happen, and supply started dropping rapidly, those who watched closely saw an opportunity to control the market, and they did. Cards were bought in heavy bundles to choke the market and decide the prices - all for profit. And as crypto boosted so did the pockets of scalpers and retailers who seized the day. This coupled with an artificial break in the supply chain supported by pandemic layoffs in logistics, where - as demand grew, employment in the supply chain did not strengthen because companies knew inflation was right around the corner and that meant more money. To believe mining has nothing to do with this current GPU market is absurd at best. Whether or not miners made 25% of purchases is beside the point, it's the fact that their purchasing power in the market increased at a time when it was easy to see that more miners would enter the market and pay up. This heavily influenced scalpers and one off retailers to control the market for profit - an issue that hasnt existed in this market previously. Gamers aren't entitled, but their consumerism and enthusiasm did build the GPU market. Developers would be smart to create a separate piece of hardware specifically for miners and devide the market to create two separate markets so they can cut out the scalpers altogether and profit even more. Money and greed ruins all, and it's that same insidious wanting that has severely impacted the GPU market in a negative way and it wasnt because of gamers.