Although you have been unable to buy the best graphics card on MSRP, partly because of the crypto mining boom, it looks like storage may be the next component affected by inventory issues, from routers to RAM.

A new cryptocurrency called Chia will be mined through storage instead of GPU and will start trading next month. It may see hardware prices increase in the near future, such as the best SSDs for games and hard drives. According to a report from Times Finance, we have already seen this in China. The profit of mining currency is proportional to the capacity of the storage device itself, so it is mainly hard disk drives with larger capacity that are affected.

According to reports, the two largest hardware retailers in China are out of stock with HDDs with a capacity of more than 6TB, and prices will rise sharply if they are in stock. A supplier previously sold its 6TB WD enterprise hard drive at 820 yuan ($125), but this almost doubled to 1,450 yuan ($222).

Since solid-state drives usually provide more money with less capacity, their prices in China have not been affected to the same extent, apparently they have risen by about 100 CN¥ to 200 CN¥ (15-30 US dollars).

Only time will tell whether this new cryptocurrency will affect storage prices in the long term. Chia will start trading on May 3rd, after which we may have a clearer understanding of the direction of pricing.

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When he is not browsing Amazon's inventory of graphics cards for his haggard gear-which is not a good look for hardware writers-you may find him riding a mountain bike or playing his current favorite game: Forza Motorsport: Horizon 4, CS:GO and Microsoft Flight Simulator.