Newegg offers a 20% Black Friday discount if you pay in crypto
Newegg has decided to curse on Black Friday with its newest promotion, which offers a 20% discount when you pay with cryptocurrency through BitPay in the UK, Australia, the UAE, and other countries. The discount will apply to orders over $500 USD (although the promotion isn’t actually available in the US), with a maximum discount of $200. A large selection of items will be eligible, including CPUs, graphics cards, hard drives, and monitors.
To take part in the promotion, you need to use BitPay, a crypto wallet app that includes currencies like Dogecoin, Bitcoin, and Ethereum. Newegg proudly announced its support of BitPay way back in 2019, and now it’s incentivizing its use for this year’s deals-heavy Black Friday season. The deal is not available in the US, but it is in the UK, Australia, Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
It’s not a good look for Newegg. Cryptocurrencies and NFTs have sparked a ton of controversy in the world and in the PC gaming space this year. Besides the fact that proof-of-work cryptocurrencies (which emphasize GPU mining) use environmentally-devastating amounts of energy that disproportionately affect developing countries (related: play Umurangi Generation), they’re also quite volatile. In the last six months, the price of Bitcoin has ranged from $30,000 to a more recent high of $67,000. Everything from new Chinese regulation to Elon Musk’s tweet have dramatically impacted the value of cryptocurrencies this year.
Cryptocurrencies are also at the heart of scams, particularly with the rise in blockchain and NFT games. A group of anonymous people developing an NFT game based on the Netflix Squid Game show stole $3.4 million from investors of the project. $2.7 million was stolen from the Evolve Apes NFT game last month. NFT fans call these situations “rugpulls,” a term that speaks to how frequently users are being defrauded.
As a limited time promotion (that ends on November 29), the Newegg crypto deal encourages you to use a volatile type of currency simply for the immediate, flat savings on a variety of components. But in the long term, these sorts of promotions harm both the planet, but PC gaming in general. Part of the reason Newegg has had to implement a lottery system for GPUs is because of the processing demand of crypto mining. This is one of the reasons that you can’t find a 30-series GPU. With this promotion, Newegg has found a way to capitalize on the Black Friday rush, without a care for anyone that isn’t bought into the crypto creed.
