Exactly. Because we all know it's the gamers who are buying up all these cards. But for some reason only the ATI/AMDs. You can find nVidia cards every day all day. Huh.. they must not be very good for gaming I guess.
Because we all know it's the miners who are buying up all these cards. But for some reason the difficulty is trending down.You can see just how many of these recently purchased 6970s are mining by looking at the next difficulty prediction. If we did drive them out of stock it was a poor purchase decision it seems, because we're pushing it back towards 1784732 at the moment. Maybe if you wait a few days you'll be able to buy an open box version cheaper when all the panic sellers return some hardware.
"But for some reason the difficulty is trending down."
Say what?
Difficulty hasn't gone down even 1% since Bitcoin hit the public eye -- let's say May 10th, 2011.
Most of us registered on or after that date. (And please, you 20 people who registered before then, don't chime in this thread with a roll call -- I know you exist, but MOST of us came in May or later)
The fact of the matter is: we have yet to see ANY difficulty decrease since Bitcoin became common knowledge.
You're probably looking at "instant" difficulty estimates which mean nothing. The current outlook is 1.94 up from 1.89 -- we're looking at another 10 or 11% increase about 12 1/2 days from the last one.