In terms of your economics lesson @Upacs you got it mostly right. Except for lesson 1. It
will mostly shut down and discourage
amateur scalpers. It
will not do anything to stop
pro scalpers. It's about time this forum learned the difference between amateur and pro scalpers as there are massive differences in dealing and understanding both. Some of you might know everything I am about to say. Others will be learning this for the first time. First things to understand about the pro scalper over the amateur are all facts. Fact #1: the pro scalpers who are a big part of our struggle are people who have been in the scalping business long before I was born in 1979. When they got their start they were people you found in the parking lots of sports stadiums and concert venues selling tickets they bought to a sporting event or music concert event. Fact #2: pros didn't start by selling the GPUs we all want. It started really with again major sporting events and concerts before I was born. Later, it escalated starting in the 1980's with rare and expensive designer clothes. In the 1990's you started to see pros sell rare basketball shoes (Air Jordans anyone?) and rare and valuable sports/Pokemon/Magic: The Gathering cards. Fact #3: many pros not only have been doing this a long, long time but they have also accumulated a strong amount of wealth on their own (in the millions of dollars) selling items before the RTX 30 series and Radeon RX 6000 series even caught their eye. Therefore they have the disposable income to spend on these GPUs for a long time coming going forward and they will until availability becomes so strong that they can't keep up with the one day down the road expanded inventory.
So what attracted the scalpers as a whole both pro and amateur to high technology items? Well, I've come to believe of everything I've seen, heard and read (and what I know about scalpers who were in the business before the pandemic) it was at first a gamble for them too. One needs to remember that when the pandemic started, it shut down 2 things especially that were a big money-maker for them: college/pro sporting events and music concerts. The pros needed another big ticket item and quick. When they saw our GPUs we want so bad they paid attention to 3 qualities about the product:
- Ultra high demand from gaming community first (miners second)
- Limited availability
- Most of the sale would take place online
From this, the pros first looked into this and said, "We're not making money from concerts and sporting events right now but we have this financial capitol and maybe we can buy a few of these cards when they come out and see if we can sell them for elevated prices." This is the same philosophy/attitude they have for other things they scalped. When they got their retail bots going (that were meant for buying other items before this mind you) and ambushed Amazon/Newegg/Best Buy et al on RTX 3080 launch day and found they were selling a decent amount of them on eBay, StockX, Amazon 3rd party and then later Newegg 3rd party amateurs caught wind quickly and decided to get in the act. In a way this became a perfect storm for them to make money and us to be left out of being able to build/upgrade our machines for some time (that's still going on by the way). Some scalpers who started as amateur when the RTX 3080 launched have graduated to pros during this time and based on where we are at now and where this is going to continue it will be amateurs backing out at one point but there will be some pros who drag this out as long as possible or as long as other money making options are not easily available due to the pandemic. Out!
)
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