A Tiny Part’s Big Ripple:
A Computer Chip Shortage Has Hobbled the Auto Industry - The New York Times (nytimes.com)](A Computer Chip Shortage Has Hobbled the Auto Industry - The New York Times)
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'Mr. Källenius said, though, that the most sophisticated chips were not the ones currently giving him headaches. “We are missing the most simple of chips, that maybe only cost cents or dollars,” he said. “That’s holding us up from building a product that costs $75,000.” ’
Yeap! And those are the MCUs!
Some manufacturers actually decided to go back to analog solutions in lower trims/cheaper models, to save the chips for more high end versions, e.g. for instrument clusters, which are now often based on MCU-controlled displays.
BTW I’m sure you all noticed that it got very difficult to buy boards like STM Nucleo, many online vendors don’t have them in stock.
And another bubble is the GPUs, but that’s also because of the crypto-frenzy. It seems impossible to find a 10xx/16xx nVidia cards, and those left are the ridiculously priced “super-special-extreme” versions that cost three times the regular price.
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I wonder if we will have more GPUs now that China is starting to come down on bitcoin 
I’m not into cryptos but just read something the other day, that this “China coming down on bitcoin” has become a recurring threat, but sort of an empty one. Who knows. Meanwhile I read that there are other cryptocurrencies now, where the victims are hard drives 
I wonder if we could somehow agree to do those things without burning through resources in the process.
I’m also kinda surprised about that GPU surge, I thought the professional mining had moved towards FPGAs.
I thought Vijay might have been joking but I found out that GPUs have been hot items for Ethereum mining. I read that Nvidia is producing GPUs just for mining now and they are putting “hash limits” on GPUs for gaming to discourage using them for mining.
I should have said Nvidia is putting limits on their hash rates.
According to a Nvidia blog
A Further Step to Getting GeForce Cards into the Hands of Gamers | The Official NVIDIA Blog
new video cards will have limits on their hash rates and be labelled LHR or Lite Hash Rate.
And in
GeForce Is Made for Gaming, CMP Is Made to Mine | The Official NVIDIA Blog
They discuss their CMP cards that will be made for cryptocurrency.
From Investopedia How Does Bitcoin Mining Work? What Is Crypto Mining? (investopedia.com)
Miners are getting paid for their work as auditors. They are doing the work of verifying the legitimacy of Bitcoin transactions. This convention is meant to keep Bitcoin users honest and was conceived by bitcoin’s founder, Satoshi Nakamoto. By verifying transactions, miners are helping to prevent the "[double-spending]
(Double-Spending Definition) problem.”
Double spending is a scenario in which a bitcoin owner illicitly spends the same bitcoin twice. With physical currency, this isn’t an issue: once you hand someone a $20 bill to buy a bottle of vodka, you no longer have it, so there’s no danger you could use that same $20 bill to buy lotto tickets next door. While there is the possibility of counterfeit cash being made, it is not exactly the same as literally spending the same dollar twice. With digital currency, however, as the Investopedia dictionary explains, “there is a risk that the holder could make a copy of the digital token and send it to a merchant or another party while retaining the original.””
What is a hash rate and why is important in cryptocurrency mining? :Coin Report (coin-report.net)
A hash is the output of a hash function, and in the context of Bitcoin, the hash rate is the rate at which a computer completes an operation in Bitcoin code. A higher hash rate is better for mining, as it increases the chance of finding the next block and receiving the reward.
I think it must refer to a decryption operation on hashed encryption or using hashing algorithms in some kind of trial and error, but I am not sure exactly sure about that.
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Thanks for sharing these links, very informative.