I have it on good authority that BTC, Eth and co are going to the moon this year. Lambo production has been tripled in recent months to ensure expected demand can be met.In my view it will improve signfiicantly by mid year.
Both the big Crypto's have done a ~10x in the last year so mining is profitable right now, along with new more power efficient hardware.
All those GPU's diverted to mining have increased the hash rate drastically, Ethereum global hash rate is 20% up in January alone with no sign of slowing down as these new fast cards are thrown into the mix by the pallet.... along with some Asics. So that's 20% less rewards per day just this month. At this sort of rate deflation mining in the UK is already not going to be profitable on hardware bought specifically for mining.
The payback on an MRSP 3060Ti back in early January would have been 3-4 months at UK electric prices, now at £500+ for the same card it's more than six months. In 2 months time, the same £500 3060Ti will have a spot ROI of 12 months and in reality with the hash rate increasing quickly month on month even cards bought now are unlikely to ever pay back half of the purchase cost this year due to the high UK energy price and the effect of compounding global hash rate increases. Add in to the mix that mining rewards are likely to be reduced in the summer (EIP-1559) and that the above payback assumtions include the current Eth price holding at $1300 ish.... the party won't last forever.
Unless the Eth price makes a strong and permanent upward move, I predect UK miners will be looking to offload their cards from mid to late Q2.
Older (less efficent) cards will flood the market first.
Even if pricing hits $2k per Eth, that only delays break even for another couple of months.
GPU supply into key mining regions will continue but at a less agressive rate as ROI's fall so there will be more cards globally along with used cards on the market.
Keep the faith, The market will come back to gamers sooner than you think.
I expect there will be plenty of new and well priced used cards in the summer.
That said... if you do have a capable GPU's or two sitting around in a gaming machine or as a spare, you can make a little pocket change for the next few months
I've done OK over the last few months and will probably have enough profit to pay for my next GPU upgrade by summer and the extra heat hasn't gone to waste in winter.
On a more serious note, I wouldn't recommend anyone buy used mining GPUs. Been there, done that, enjoyed the memory artefacts. Miners might downclock/downvolt the core, but they absolutely hammer the VRAM to the maximum extent they can.