News Bots Strike Again: How Sneaker-Buying Bots Stole (Almost) All the RTX 3090s

[clsmithj]

I don't understand your first point. If Asus sells pallets of GPU's to mining companies, it doesn't just affect one market, it's reducing the supply for everyone. When Nvidia signs the contract to sell $30 million in GPU's to a company, that's a whole lot of GPU's that aren't going to AIB's to be sold on the global market. Where the sale takes place is completely irrelevant.

The problem isn't only scalping. Again, mining is a much much bigger problem. The reason why people are paying such jacked up prices on auction sites is because they expect to make the money back using the card to mine when they aren't gaming. If there was no profit to be made mining, no one is paying $1500+ for a 3080.

How many national electronics companies are there in the US that sell video cards? Best Buy, that's it. With Fry's (who was regional, not national) going bankrupt, the only other sort of major retailer in the US is Microcenter, which again is regional, most of the country don't have one near them. So unless you want Best Buy to be the only video card retailer for most of the country, your in-store only proposal doesn't work.

I don't doubt that mining might be a problem in foreign countries, I seen the photos of smuggling GPUs in east Asia, but that does not effect the shipment that goes to North America.

What's effecting our shipment is how it's being listed, and currently the online retail is the worse method for AMD and NVIDIA to be distributing these cards out for customers to purchase, because a majority of these are not real customers but bots ran by Shoe bots using specialized software that will get them the cards as soon as possible so they can flip and resale them to real customers at scalped prices.

I know about cryptocurrency miner's strategy when it comes paying heavy up front for hardware as the mining efforts pay off their expenses. I used to GPU mine in the past. I'm trying to get it across to you that focusing and blaming it on cryptocurrency mining misses my point entirely. That group at least here in the west are in the same F'd situation as desperate PC building and PC gamers find themselves in right now who need a graphics card and can't get one through normal online ordering means at msrp, they have to go through the Scalper that shoe bots are empowering. Miners alone aren't determining the cost, its everyone who gives into a scalper's high priced GPU that helps them determine the going sell for the item. You are assuming everyone who buys a $1500 RTX 3080 is going to mine with it, when there's no basis to assume that at all. But I digress, the problem is online stores being hyjacked by Shoe bots, and manufactures should look to making GPUs available for brick and mortar only.

Even if Best Buy was the only store, there's 800 Best Buy Stores in America compared to 20 Micro-Centers. There's also
Office Depot, Walmart, Target, Staples, and now Gamestop that are located in each state across the nation, so there are plenty of retail brick-and-mortars that can distribute them in their computer section. So there really is no excuse.