They aren't billion dollar operations. Although scalpers likely are buying hundreds or thousands at once. That doesn't really matter because there are thousands of scalpers all competing with each other in a... What's the word? Oh yeah, a market.

scalpers have existed since the cavemen era. Me get rock from dumb dumb sell rock to desperate dumb dumb. The river is abundant with rocks but dumb dumb want pretty rock now.

Besides there is anti scalping measures being implemented all over
https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/joao-silva/amd-sends-anti-scalping-measures-to-retailers-ahead-of-new-cpu-and-gpu-launches/#:~:text=Other%20anti-scalping%20measures%20include,product%20be%20in%20the%20cart.

This morning we saw unprecedented demand for the GeForce RTX 3080 at global retailers, including the NVIDIA online store. At 6 a.m. pacific we attempted to push the NVIDIA store live. Despite preparation, the NVIDIA store was inundated with traffic and encountered an error. We were able to resolve the issues and sales began registering normally.

To stop bots and scalpers on the NVIDIA store, we’re doing everything humanly possible, including manually reviewing orders, to get these cards in the hands of legitimate customers.

Over 50 major global retailers had inventory at 6 a.m. pacific. Our NVIDIA team and partners are shipping more RTX 3080 cards every day to retailers.

We apologize to our customers for this morning’s experience.”

This post was edited by addone on May 8 2021 10:26pm

is $10 net? like minus the electric bills and shit?

About. Electricity is 75c a day

People were scalping vaccine appointments lol

lmao forreals?

that's literally how almost all produce is sold, tho. farmers sell it, and the large box chain grocery stores are the only ones able to put up capital in amounts large enough to sway farmers to sell at scale, grow at scale, etc. then it gets transported, and there is some loss, and the product sells for a solid margin over the buy+shipping+loss total.

the farmers market has product generally at half the price of most grocery stores for 2x the quality. demand for GPUs has just never risen to food levels before, its getting there.

In this example, there's some value odd though. Like half the battle with produce is getting it from the hands of the farmers to the store where people buy it. There's a lot that happens in between that warrants a 2x or whatever price increase.

Here the value add is non-existent. It's entirely parasitic. Nvidia sells the cards on their website. Some lucky consumers get theirs, many don't because you have middle man companies basically cleaning them out only to resell at a 2x+ markup.

Like i wouldn't have much of an issue if these companies were buying them because they needed them for their business operations or whatever but that's not what it is about. It's entirely about turning around and immediately flipping them.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on May 10 2021 07:43am

most of the "value add" in both cases is automated. once picked and sold to a distributor vegetables are sorted, sprayed with preservatives, irradiated if crossing the border, boxed, overwrapped, palleted all without a person touching them. at least on the large scale. the human value added is a fork lift driver on both ends.

the value added for the grocery store, and the part of the profit that specific store profits from, is unboxing, sorting, and setting out the produce. but for the distributer their role is to have money, and an automated sorting system able to handle bulk at scale, then drivers.

i agree that produce vendors add more value, but that's still offset somewhat by the common automated process and shipping and handling being a constant in both examples. the core tenant rings true, in a free market system secondary vendors arise when demand allows for a secondary market. period, this is the free market system. whether its diamond companies creating false scarcity and running billion dollar ad campaigns to maintain that demand level or the rising demand for computer parts outstripping the ability for them to be manufactured.

in any case it seems temporary, i highly doubt NVIDIA or whomever leaves this much profit on the table for long. they'll streamline, they'll increase prices, and they'll squash some portion of the market and make their parts more readily available. to the chagrin of miners and scalpers alike.

Just bought a second 3090.

Gonna mine on it and if coins go down I'll sell it on ebay to a gamer.

Get on my level scrubs.