If you're a PC builder—or your aging desktop system is in dire need of some modern upgrades—you've probably wondered why it's impossible to get a graphics card lately. If you want a specific graphics card and can't find it at the store, which might already cost you more than what you would have spent six months ago, you'll be paying a hefty surcharge if you have to turn to sites like eBay or Craigslist.

Or as PC Gamer's Jarred Walton put it earlier this week, "Right now is the worst time in the history of graphics cards to buy or upgrade this all-important gaming component."

You can thank the outrageous interest in cryptocurrency for all of this. Since graphics cards mine cryptocurrency much faster than CPUs, an eager community of get-rich-quick enthusiasts are scooping up graphics cards as fast as they can get them. Miners are only earning a handful of dollars each day per card, but there's always that hope that the price of [your chosen cryptocurrency] is going to skyrocket and make you an instant multimillionaire. So miners keep buying and mining, and they cause a worldwide shortage for gamers who want better frame rates, not bitcoin.

While there isn't much major manufacturers AMD and Nvidia can do about the overwhelming demand for GPUs, Nvidia is at least trying to let retailers know that they should be holding their stock for the company's core audience: gamers, not miners.

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"For NVIDIA, gamers come first. All activities related to our GeForce product line are targeted at our main audience. To ensure that GeForce gamers continue to have good GeForce graphics card availability in the current situation, we recommend that our trading partners make the appropriate arrangements to meet gamers' needs as usual," reads a translated statement Nvidia's Boris Böhles recently provided to ComputerBase.de, as reported by Wccftech.

Nvidia is suggesting that retailers limit graphics card orders to just two per person, but that's just an idea—one Nvidia can't actually enforce beyond restricting sales on its website, which it's currently doing. That said, it wouldn't be difficult to place multiple orders on behalf of you and your friends to skirt Nvidia's two-per-person limit. While Nvidia's move will at least force an amateur cryptocurrency miners to get creative instead of just buying 16 graphics cards at once, the larger supply and demand issues cryptocurrency miners and gamers face might only be settled by time.

"…at some point, graphics card prices will reach a new level of normalcy, and we're not there yet. Prices will have to come down, because even miners can't justify paying the current rates. That is, unless Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies resume their upward momentum, but every exponential growth curve eventually ends," Walton writes.