I´m another crypto guy. I mine ethereum with my gpu when it´s not doing anything and monero with my cpu. I make some money on it.
The same as investing on crypto currencies... I don´t think I´m gambling at all, if you understand those charts, they are just a representation of people´s hopes and fears, a representation of the psychology behind the investors, that normally behave the same way.
example: Elon Musk say they are going to use bitcoin and they buy bitcoin the "herd" buys bitcoin because of these good news, you as an investor should be selling or taking profit on these kind of news and on the contrary, buying or accumulating when the market is fearfull and "crypto is dead" Not gambling, just human behaviour printed on a chart.
As for the mining problem, well, this is a very new technology, and as everything when is new, it has it´s problems that have to be improved, but it has great potential to change the way the world works (mostly in the finance tasks) as much as internet changed the way humans interact with each other. But this will take time, the internet exists for a longtime, and the user experience in 1990 was shitty AF, but the potential was there, and look what it is today. The same may happen with crypto as a technology, no one can predict the future, and one can only see the negative side of things but it has a lot of potential to change our lifes for the better... as everything in life it also depends on how we choose to use this technology.
For example there are several protocols (Aave, Curve, Comp) already working (and they are audited) that gives yield for people who put their dollars there (on several types on stable coins that mimic the price of the dollar, so it doesn´t fluctuate) and with that same money, they give loans to others. The good thing about this protocols is that it´s impossible to lend money that doesn´t exists, as banks do. And also you don´t need a bank infrastructure to get a loan, or get acces to several services that traditional banks give. Another good thing is that this is just code, you don´t have to trust the banker, or the person who you are lending to, the thing just executes itself (this has some really bad possible outcomes also)
There are other kind of projects with very interesting uses like Akash that you give your computational power in exchange of the token, so you have an incentive. If someone wants to buy computational power for whatever project it has to pay some of that crypto, and you get it in the percentage that you have helped, so we have like an AWS type of thing, but decentralized.
There is also Theta that is making a kind of youtube in which the codification process happens in everyusers PC instead on a centraliced server (and you get paid theta token for it) ....
To sum up. the potential of this technology is just huge, and as everything in this world it has two sides, a good one and a bad one, it depends on us as a society to make good use of it.
The GPU problem is more complex than what it seems, because for example noone mines with AMD gpus, and they are as scarce and as expensive as nvidia. (well, maybe not as much, but close) And the chip manufacturing scarcity goes al around the world with (for example) car manufacturers not being able to provide certain extras to some cars due to the fact that they dont have supply for some chips. I don´t know much about this, but without wanting to say that mining has its impact (because it has) the global situation with the silicon market in general is not good. Remember we were talking about paper launches with zen cpus before this gpu problem.
