8 ms·

What's this about? Are the bots operated to manipulate the market, by buying up the whole supply to then sell at a higher price?

by ephbit 5y ago

dljsjr 5y ago
I guess you could call it market manipulation but it's more just resellers/scalpers trying to take advantage of the chip shortage. RPis have always been in high demand and often were backordered even when things were fine; now they're supply constrained enough that scalpers can buy up in bulk and resell at high markup, similar to the GPU aftermarket going on right now.
jason-phillips 5y ago
Yes, in many industries.
teeray 5y ago
The bots are middlemen that ensure proper pricing of scarce goods. Their commission is the difference between the retail price and the actual market price.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  Vultures, parasites, vampires.
- MereInterest 5y ago
  - internet_user 5y ago
    Whats your preferred method of rationing scarce resources?
    - mfringel 5y ago
      My preferred method is overly broad rhetorical questions that add nothing to the conversation. Also, spatula. Yours?
    - colechristensen 5y ago
      Putting severe limits on people who would arbitrage the rarity when the seller doesn't want to raise prices. Allowing the seller to determine how they want to distribute sales of the item (as long as it isn't price gouging essential goods)
    - kube-system 5y ago
      Adafruit isn't "rationing scarce resources", they're trying to provide good service to their customers. Adafruit is an actor in a "free market" acting in their best interest.
      - internet_user 5y ago
        i don't disagree, adafruit is probably acting in their best interest, however they perceive what that interest might be, it's not always just "more profit", more often than not, it's a matter of survival that is at stake. My issue was with the comment somehow suggesting the entire system (Big Bad Market) is somehow less wise than an individual actor. Yet, the entire system contains much more information, that the individual actor does not, and can never have access to, e.g. value judgements of other market participants he will never meet. Markets, at the core, are just auctions. It's one way to resolve the question who gets the scarce resource first. At other times, it's medical triage, a system very different from "free markets". It can also be first-come, first-serve, which is what currently being attempted by Adafruit now. Many such options. Why is "free market" judged to be inappropriate here? From my experience in markets with severe shortages, first-come/first-serve rationing approach never failed to produce a poor supply, and free floating markets were always oversupplied (to a varying extent, but in general there was a trend).
        kube-system 5y ago
        Sometimes people express a sentiment that the supply/demand curves are more than just tools to evaluate a situation, but instead, are a sacred ideal to always strive towards. But economists also recognize that markets are awful at pricing in externalities, and even worse at respecting morals and ethics.
        kelnos 5y ago
        This is the core of it for me. The base Raspberry Pi model is supposed to cost $35, because the Raspberry Pi Foundation has decided that offering a low cost SBC is important for the world. Using a bot to buy up all inventory so you can resell it at $50 or $100 or whatever is unethical. You have provided no added value; you are just a parasite scalping others for your own enrichment. If this is what a "free market" is, as many people here seem to think, then free markets are objectively bad for the commons.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      There a many ways to ration scarce resources. Each method serves different goals so different methods are appropriate in different contexts. Here's an incomplete list of common tools: 0) fitness judgement (e.g. grants, scholarships etc) 1) First come first serve (e.g. most product launches) 2) lottery (e.g. grand canyon rafting permits) 3) auction (e.g. broadband spectrum) 4) third party speculators (e.g. scalping) You can often use several of these methods simulatenously, but if your goals include prioritizing egalitarian access to the scarce resource then #4 can significantly interfere with that goal. There's a reason you aren't allowed to resell grand canyon rafting permits.
      - NextHendrix 5y ago
        >grand canyon rafting permits Interesting, I had no idea. More info https://www.nps.gov/grca/planyourvisit/weightedlottery.htm https://www.nps.gov/grca/planyourvisit/weightedlottery.htm
        shkkmo 5y ago
        It's actually extremely relevant as the weighted lottery system for non-commercial permits was used to replace the prior system which was a first-come first-served waitlist. It's a great example of evaluating different methods of rationing access to a limited resource when the primary goal is not maximizing revenue or efficiently distributing resources for maximum economic production.
    - kelnos 5y ago
      Why should "whoever has the most money" or "whoever is willing to pay the highest price" be the fairest way to ration scarce resources? Speculative resellers don't actually provide any value. They just extract extra cash from people who want something, when -- absent the retailer with automated buying tools that are faster than humans -- those people could have acquired the product from the original seller at a lower price. I think "whoever gets through the website order form the fastest" is a perfectly reasonable (if often frustrating) way to ration scarce resources. You get in line, as a person, and get to buy some limited quantity for your own personal use. Certainly no one can outright ban a secondary reseller market, but I think it's perfectly reasonable for a shop to want to sell to real end-users rather than people who will just turn around and scalp people who could have been potential customers... customers who are now frustrated and get a worse experience.
      - teeray 5y ago
        > I think "whoever gets through the website order form the fastest" is a perfectly reasonable (if often frustrating) way to ration scarce resources. Until you put the FTTH connection in Ashburn, VA sitting next door to every major cloud provider against the 3G user in Somalia. Clicking through the form degenerates to an unfair lottery where you can buy more raffle tickets by paying more to your ISP.
        kelnos 5y ago
        I'm pretty sure no one is upgrading their internet connection just so they can have a better chance of buying a Raspberry Pi.
      - AussieWog93 5y ago
        > Why should "whoever has the most money" or "whoever is willing to pay the highest price" be the fairest way to ration scarce resources? It's not the fairest, but it is definitely better than arbitrary. If Alice is willing to pay $5 for a widget, and Bob is willing to pay $50, it's likely that Bob values the item more than Alice does. It's also possible that Alice is simply poor, of course, but I can't imagine how a practical system could take this into account without also destroying incentive structures. >I think "whoever gets through the website order form the fastest" is a perfectly reasonable (if often frustrating) way to ration scarce resources. You get in line, as a person, and get to buy some limited quantity for your own personal use. This is arbitrary, IMO. Might as well hand them out to whomever can win a race in Mario Kart.
    - jabroni_salad 5y ago
      Are they actually scarce, though? Is it legitimate customers, or botted speculators, that create more demand? It seems to me that someone has realized the product is slow enough they can afford to just buy all of them to resell regardless of actual demand. I used to do this with glyphs in WoW and got a lot of hate mail for it. I was buying cheaper glyphs in such quantities that I would delete a good third of them due to warehousing capacity and was still making money reselling other peoples products, and even then I was not selling 100% of my stock. To me this means that demand was actually lower than what the market could bear if it werent for me pinning it at 100% by buying literally everything. It's totally abusive but nobody can do anything about it.
      - evilDagmar 5y ago
        They're actually scarce because of the wonderful debacle the whole supply chain has become in the past two years. This short-term scarcity is being exploited by bad actors who are seizing upon an opportunity to attempt buy up all the remaining stock in hopes that the legitimate end users will be forced to purchase from them at inflated prices. As far as "nobody can do anything about it" is concerned, 15 states have made ticket scalping illegal because it harms consumers, and if this sort of thing continues you can bet that will expand further. Such legislation would even be fairly straightforward to write, but I suspect it will be more entertaining to watch as various scalpers of retail gear get nailed for various forms of tax evasion.
  - 34679 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > In Comments > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      I don't think GP's comment is particularly unkind or mean-spirited. It could be a cultural thing, though.
      - MereInterest 5y ago
        While it could be argued whether I was being unkind, in re-reading I certainly wasn't being kind, and there was no small amount of snark. While I stand by the sentiment behind the comment, I don't think it is likely to change the mind of the poster I was replying to. There's a chance that it would avoid having the conversation turn into an extremely capitalist/libertarian echo chamber as commonly happens here, but that's about the extent of it. Partly, the mindset that was evident in teeray's post was rather frustrating. Implicit in the post was a dismissal of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's goals of providing low-cost teaching hardware, an assumption that re-distribution to those who can pay more is a good thing, blame at Adafruit for not having priced out the primary target market in the first place, and praise for scalpers who are standing between a charity (RPF) and its intended recipients. None of those were explicitly stated, but those are the implications and results of the philosophy in that comment. It's a cruel, unkind, and mean-spirited philosophy, which is why I felt it appropriate to respond with snark.
        cinntaile 5y ago
        Who are the intended recipients and how certain are you that they're the ones buying them?
- dymk 5y ago
  The bots ensure that steps are taken such that scares goods are distributed in a manner better than "whoever can pay the most". RPis have, and will continue to be, aimed at education and enrichment, and the makers/retailers will take steps to ensure that as many people as possible can get ahold of them at a low price.
  - Ajedi32 5y ago
    If you want to start making value judgements about who is worthy to purchase your product, wouldn't it be better to enforce that by directly verifying the identity/worthiness of each individual customer rather than relying on crude proxies like "didn't use a bot to make the purchase"?
    - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
      It's not a crude proxy. In this case it is a vendor deciding not to sell to a customer who is acting in a way they perceive to be bad faith. This is their right as a vendor. In this case it happens that the bad faith is at comfortably odds with the objectives of the vendor and product manufacturer. As high incomes diverge even further from low (and even median) incomes, we're doing to see this happen a lot more. And I think until this chip shortage is over in particular, we will see a lot more measures like this. I fully applaud this -- I love my Pi 4 and I want more people to experience what these little things can do, without paying over the odds to cynical manipulative stains.
- ryandrake 5y ago
  Not sure why you're getting DV'ed. If a product is priced such that it is actually profitable to have bots buy it (and presumably re-sell), then it's priced incorrectly and the bots are a corrective market force. If a gas station started selling gasoline at half price, it would be instantly overrun with everyone from Harry with his pickup truck full of jerry cans to empty tanker trucks.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    With enough money you can corner any market and turn an abundant product into a rare one. Tends to make a lot of money for a few people until the market inevitably crashes which often puts many of the suppliers out of business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
    - criddell 5y ago
      Wasn’t that long ago that somebody tried to corner the cacao market. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/business/global/25chocolate.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/business/global/25chocola...
    - teeray 5y ago
      This doesn’t always work out, and can destroy the speculator too. Imagine how many piles of hand sanitizer and toilet paper are out there, bought to resell for profit.
    - logifail 5y ago
      see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Bunker_Hunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Bunker_Hunt
    - mardifoufs 5y ago
      Attempts to corner markets have always almost resulted in disastrous losses for the conspirators. Not that cornering the raspberry pi market would even be possible or make sense.
- jterrys 5y ago
  The world isn't a stock market simulation.
- Karellen 5y ago
  It's a roundabout way of stating the 55th rule of acquisition, but I'll allow it. Or is it the 110th? (The 140th and 144th also seem relevant here.)
- atsmyles 5y ago
  This is true. However, it is not the whole story. 0. Adafruit cannot raise prices of rpis due to contract. 1. Adafruit makes the same amount of money regardless of who buys the product. 2. It is in the incentive of Adafruit to increase it's customers good will. It is considered an asset for Adafruit (Companies account for this via 'Good Will'). 3. People generally don't like scalpers, "Scalpers bad" 4. By providing means to avoid scalpers, they are capturing some of the profit that scalpers would be making and converting it to a 'Good Will' asset, "Adafruit Good" 5. 'Good Will' + money > money Thank you for participating in economic analysis.
  - meltedcapacitor 5y ago
    Point of order on 2: Companies do not account for this as "good will". Accounting "goodwill" is the price an acquiring company pays above the accounting value of the business being bought, which is a notional number usually (much) lower than the economic value of a successful business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting)
    - pinky1417 5y ago
      Correct. Aatsmyles was mistaken in relating the goodwill he/she described to accounting goodwill. In other words, aatsmyles shouldn't have used the phrase "account for" goodwill. Interestingly (at least to a weird human like me), there is something of a relationship between accounting goodwill and goodwill like the value of a brand. The reason why goodwill only shows up on a balance sheet after an acquisition is, I imagine, to follow the accounting principal of conservatism. Let's spice things up with a hypothetical. I'm going to make up some numbers here so don't go around telling people I revealed some privileged information on HN. Say you're Mr. McIlhenny, the() owner of a major private company called the McIlhenny Company. The McIlhenny Company's primary endeavor is selling a beloved hot sauce called Tabasco. On the income statement side, McIlhenny has revenues of $200 million and profits of $30 million. On the balance sheet, Tabasco has no liabilities (no long term debt, no payables, etc) and its only asset is cash, of which it has $1 million. Since (equity) = (assets) - (liabilities), this company has a "book value" of $1 million. You might notice that the book value seems absurd - a company that makes tens of millions of dollars a year and has a product with a major following would be a total steal of a purchase at $1 million! A few purchasers attempt to woo you, and they each make offers for about $100 million. You go with Carl Icahn's offer. Now, the company's book value is $100 million (the balance sheet has $1 million in cash and $99 million in goodwill on it). Clearly, the day before the acquisition, the company had roughly $99 million in "real" or "intrinsic" goodwill, but that didn't show up in the balance sheet. Why's that? One reason is conservatism. For many intangible assets, there's an art to choosing a number. If you let CEOs put in a goodwill number, many would probably throw in huge numbers as they vastly hype up the value of their brand and reputation. So, instead, we have a market approach to calculating goodwill by using transactions. However, accounting principals allow companies downwards. So the CEO of Nikola isn't allowed to turn his bogus claims into dollars on the goodwill line item, but he is allowed to reduce goodwill if he buys a battery manufacturer that turns out to be a fraud too. () It's owned by the McIlhenny family, but no need to complicate things
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Sorry, bro, if I'm selling a product, and part of my goal is to see "regular people" get a chance to buy it and get a decent price it's well within my rights to try methods to limit scalping, just like governments prevent gas/food overcharging during emergencies. Not everything is a "pure" market.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- evilDagmar 5y ago
  No, the bots are the reason the goods are scarce. They are not a genuine indicator of scarcity, nor are they a part of genuine price discovery. That they still exists just shows that the bot operators are too small to attract the interest of regulatory agencies. ...yet.
  - hamandcheese 5y ago
    > No, the bots are the reason the goods are scarce. It is possible that bots are creating artificial scarcity, but that would require either one bot to corner the market or collusion among enough bots to control prices. It seems equally plausible to me that RPIs would be scarce regardless.
fmajid 5y ago
All official RPi resellers are required to sell them without forced add-ons, at the list price. The scalper bots are trying to arbitrage that. I think a CAPTCHA in the ordering process would make more sense.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  I wonder how much retail arbitrage is just leaks by the resellers themselves. But always better to blame scalpers. They can’t defend themselves if they don’t even exist.
  - peterangular 5y ago
    > retail arbitrage is just leaks by the resellers themselves Anecdotal, but IMO lots... just depends on the industry. It's a good situation for someone to come along and buy up some or all of your risk - especially for stuff like ticket sales. Many corporations like Ticketmaster design around this, and bake this part of the supply chain into their pricing/experience.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >I think a CAPTCHA in the ordering process would make more sense. There was another thread here a while back where someone shared their experience writing sneaker scalping bots. Apparently, CAPTCHA tokens are valid for a minute or so, so this guy would solve heaps of them just before the form went live and cache the validation tokens. Then, when the form went live, the real humans who didn't have cached CAPTCHA tokens would be slowed down even more. Net result is that the botters ended up getting an even greater share of the supply than without CAPTCHAs.
  - peterangular 5y ago
    > Apparently, CAPTCHA tokens are valid for a minute or so, so this guy would solve heaps of them just before the form went live and cache the validation tokens. I mean there's whole services like 2captcha that give you a 24/7 on-demand API for this, and for some of their offerings/solvers there are specifically real human robots on the other end doing the CAPTCHA. 2captcha works very very well to the point that CAPTCHA is a very much solved problem especially for the popular services like Google's reCAPTCHA.
throwaway81523 5y ago
Sometimes the bots are just because people want the items for themselves. I know of some companies that bought 1000s of disk drives for their data centers that way from retailers, back when there was a drive shortage a few years ago.
- evilDagmar 5y ago
  Except they were buying them for their own use and protecting against supply chain interruptions, not buying them to sell them to other consumers at artificially-inflated rates.

What's this about? Are the bots operated to manipulate the market, by buying up the whole supply to then sell at a higher price?

by ephbit 5y ago

What's this about? Are the bots operated to manipulate the market, by buying up the whole supply to then sell at a higher price?

dljsjr 5y ago

I guess you could call it market manipulation but it's more just resellers/scalpers trying to take advantage of the chip shortage. RPis have always been in high demand and often were backordered even when things were fine; now they're supply constrained enough that scalpers can buy up in bulk and resell at high markup, similar to the GPU aftermarket going on right now.

jason-phillips 5y ago

Yes, in many industries.

teeray 5y ago

The bots are middlemen that ensure proper pricing of scarce goods. Their commission is the difference between the retail price and the actual market price.

fartcannon 5y ago
Vultures, parasites, vampires.
MereInterest 5y ago
- internet_user 5y ago
  Whats your preferred method of rationing scarce resources?
  - mfringel 5y ago
    My preferred method is overly broad rhetorical questions that add nothing to the conversation. Also, spatula. Yours?
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    Putting severe limits on people who would arbitrage the rarity when the seller doesn't want to raise prices. Allowing the seller to determine how they want to distribute sales of the item (as long as it isn't price gouging essential goods)
  - kube-system 5y ago
    Adafruit isn't "rationing scarce resources", they're trying to provide good service to their customers. Adafruit is an actor in a "free market" acting in their best interest.
    - internet_user 5y ago
      i don't disagree, adafruit is probably acting in their best interest, however they perceive what that interest might be, it's not always just "more profit", more often than not, it's a matter of survival that is at stake. My issue was with the comment somehow suggesting the entire system (Big Bad Market) is somehow less wise than an individual actor. Yet, the entire system contains much more information, that the individual actor does not, and can never have access to, e.g. value judgements of other market participants he will never meet. Markets, at the core, are just auctions. It's one way to resolve the question who gets the scarce resource first. At other times, it's medical triage, a system very different from "free markets". It can also be first-come, first-serve, which is what currently being attempted by Adafruit now. Many such options. Why is "free market" judged to be inappropriate here? From my experience in markets with severe shortages, first-come/first-serve rationing approach never failed to produce a poor supply, and free floating markets were always oversupplied (to a varying extent, but in general there was a trend).
      - kube-system 5y ago
        Sometimes people express a sentiment that the supply/demand curves are more than just tools to evaluate a situation, but instead, are a sacred ideal to always strive towards. But economists also recognize that markets are awful at pricing in externalities, and even worse at respecting morals and ethics.
        kelnos 5y ago
        This is the core of it for me. The base Raspberry Pi model is supposed to cost $35, because the Raspberry Pi Foundation has decided that offering a low cost SBC is important for the world. Using a bot to buy up all inventory so you can resell it at $50 or $100 or whatever is unethical. You have provided no added value; you are just a parasite scalping others for your own enrichment. If this is what a "free market" is, as many people here seem to think, then free markets are objectively bad for the commons.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    There a many ways to ration scarce resources. Each method serves different goals so different methods are appropriate in different contexts. Here's an incomplete list of common tools: 0) fitness judgement (e.g. grants, scholarships etc) 1) First come first serve (e.g. most product launches) 2) lottery (e.g. grand canyon rafting permits) 3) auction (e.g. broadband spectrum) 4) third party speculators (e.g. scalping) You can often use several of these methods simulatenously, but if your goals include prioritizing egalitarian access to the scarce resource then #4 can significantly interfere with that goal. There's a reason you aren't allowed to resell grand canyon rafting permits.
    - NextHendrix 5y ago
      >grand canyon rafting permits Interesting, I had no idea. More info https://www.nps.gov/grca/planyourvisit/weightedlottery.htm https://www.nps.gov/grca/planyourvisit/weightedlottery.htm
      - shkkmo 5y ago
        It's actually extremely relevant as the weighted lottery system for non-commercial permits was used to replace the prior system which was a first-come first-served waitlist. It's a great example of evaluating different methods of rationing access to a limited resource when the primary goal is not maximizing revenue or efficiently distributing resources for maximum economic production.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    Why should "whoever has the most money" or "whoever is willing to pay the highest price" be the fairest way to ration scarce resources? Speculative resellers don't actually provide any value. They just extract extra cash from people who want something, when -- absent the retailer with automated buying tools that are faster than humans -- those people could have acquired the product from the original seller at a lower price. I think "whoever gets through the website order form the fastest" is a perfectly reasonable (if often frustrating) way to ration scarce resources. You get in line, as a person, and get to buy some limited quantity for your own personal use. Certainly no one can outright ban a secondary reseller market, but I think it's perfectly reasonable for a shop to want to sell to real end-users rather than people who will just turn around and scalp people who could have been potential customers... customers who are now frustrated and get a worse experience.
    - teeray 5y ago
      > I think "whoever gets through the website order form the fastest" is a perfectly reasonable (if often frustrating) way to ration scarce resources. Until you put the FTTH connection in Ashburn, VA sitting next door to every major cloud provider against the 3G user in Somalia. Clicking through the form degenerates to an unfair lottery where you can buy more raffle tickets by paying more to your ISP.
      - kelnos 5y ago
        I'm pretty sure no one is upgrading their internet connection just so they can have a better chance of buying a Raspberry Pi.
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      > Why should "whoever has the most money" or "whoever is willing to pay the highest price" be the fairest way to ration scarce resources? It's not the fairest, but it is definitely better than arbitrary. If Alice is willing to pay $5 for a widget, and Bob is willing to pay $50, it's likely that Bob values the item more than Alice does. It's also possible that Alice is simply poor, of course, but I can't imagine how a practical system could take this into account without also destroying incentive structures. >I think "whoever gets through the website order form the fastest" is a perfectly reasonable (if often frustrating) way to ration scarce resources. You get in line, as a person, and get to buy some limited quantity for your own personal use. This is arbitrary, IMO. Might as well hand them out to whomever can win a race in Mario Kart.
  - jabroni_salad 5y ago
    Are they actually scarce, though? Is it legitimate customers, or botted speculators, that create more demand? It seems to me that someone has realized the product is slow enough they can afford to just buy all of them to resell regardless of actual demand. I used to do this with glyphs in WoW and got a lot of hate mail for it. I was buying cheaper glyphs in such quantities that I would delete a good third of them due to warehousing capacity and was still making money reselling other peoples products, and even then I was not selling 100% of my stock. To me this means that demand was actually lower than what the market could bear if it werent for me pinning it at 100% by buying literally everything. It's totally abusive but nobody can do anything about it.
    - evilDagmar 5y ago
      They're actually scarce because of the wonderful debacle the whole supply chain has become in the past two years. This short-term scarcity is being exploited by bad actors who are seizing upon an opportunity to attempt buy up all the remaining stock in hopes that the legitimate end users will be forced to purchase from them at inflated prices. As far as "nobody can do anything about it" is concerned, 15 states have made ticket scalping illegal because it harms consumers, and if this sort of thing continues you can bet that will expand further. Such legislation would even be fairly straightforward to write, but I suspect it will be more entertaining to watch as various scalpers of retail gear get nailed for various forms of tax evasion.
- 34679 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > In Comments > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    I don't think GP's comment is particularly unkind or mean-spirited. It could be a cultural thing, though.
    - MereInterest 5y ago
      While it could be argued whether I was being unkind, in re-reading I certainly wasn't being kind, and there was no small amount of snark. While I stand by the sentiment behind the comment, I don't think it is likely to change the mind of the poster I was replying to. There's a chance that it would avoid having the conversation turn into an extremely capitalist/libertarian echo chamber as commonly happens here, but that's about the extent of it. Partly, the mindset that was evident in teeray's post was rather frustrating. Implicit in the post was a dismissal of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's goals of providing low-cost teaching hardware, an assumption that re-distribution to those who can pay more is a good thing, blame at Adafruit for not having priced out the primary target market in the first place, and praise for scalpers who are standing between a charity (RPF) and its intended recipients. None of those were explicitly stated, but those are the implications and results of the philosophy in that comment. It's a cruel, unkind, and mean-spirited philosophy, which is why I felt it appropriate to respond with snark.
      - cinntaile 5y ago
        Who are the intended recipients and how certain are you that they're the ones buying them?
dymk 5y ago
The bots ensure that steps are taken such that scares goods are distributed in a manner better than "whoever can pay the most". RPis have, and will continue to be, aimed at education and enrichment, and the makers/retailers will take steps to ensure that as many people as possible can get ahold of them at a low price.
- Ajedi32 5y ago
  If you want to start making value judgements about who is worthy to purchase your product, wouldn't it be better to enforce that by directly verifying the identity/worthiness of each individual customer rather than relying on crude proxies like "didn't use a bot to make the purchase"?
  - unfocussed_mike 5y ago
    It's not a crude proxy. In this case it is a vendor deciding not to sell to a customer who is acting in a way they perceive to be bad faith. This is their right as a vendor. In this case it happens that the bad faith is at comfortably odds with the objectives of the vendor and product manufacturer. As high incomes diverge even further from low (and even median) incomes, we're doing to see this happen a lot more. And I think until this chip shortage is over in particular, we will see a lot more measures like this. I fully applaud this -- I love my Pi 4 and I want more people to experience what these little things can do, without paying over the odds to cynical manipulative stains.
ryandrake 5y ago
Not sure why you're getting DV'ed. If a product is priced such that it is actually profitable to have bots buy it (and presumably re-sell), then it's priced incorrectly and the bots are a corrective market force. If a gas station started selling gasoline at half price, it would be instantly overrun with everyone from Harry with his pickup truck full of jerry cans to empty tanker trucks.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  With enough money you can corner any market and turn an abundant product into a rare one. Tends to make a lot of money for a few people until the market inevitably crashes which often puts many of the suppliers out of business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
  - criddell 5y ago
    Wasn’t that long ago that somebody tried to corner the cacao market. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/business/global/25chocolate.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/business/global/25chocola...
  - teeray 5y ago
    This doesn’t always work out, and can destroy the speculator too. Imagine how many piles of hand sanitizer and toilet paper are out there, bought to resell for profit.
  - logifail 5y ago
    see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Bunker_Hunt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Bunker_Hunt
  - mardifoufs 5y ago
    Attempts to corner markets have always almost resulted in disastrous losses for the conspirators. Not that cornering the raspberry pi market would even be possible or make sense.
jterrys 5y ago
The world isn't a stock market simulation.
Karellen 5y ago
It's a roundabout way of stating the 55th rule of acquisition, but I'll allow it. Or is it the 110th? (The 140th and 144th also seem relevant here.)
atsmyles 5y ago
This is true. However, it is not the whole story. 0. Adafruit cannot raise prices of rpis due to contract. 1. Adafruit makes the same amount of money regardless of who buys the product. 2. It is in the incentive of Adafruit to increase it's customers good will. It is considered an asset for Adafruit (Companies account for this via 'Good Will'). 3. People generally don't like scalpers, "Scalpers bad" 4. By providing means to avoid scalpers, they are capturing some of the profit that scalpers would be making and converting it to a 'Good Will' asset, "Adafruit Good" 5. 'Good Will' + money > money Thank you for participating in economic analysis.
- meltedcapacitor 5y ago
  Point of order on 2: Companies do not account for this as "good will". Accounting "goodwill" is the price an acquiring company pays above the accounting value of the business being bought, which is a notional number usually (much) lower than the economic value of a successful business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting)
  - pinky1417 5y ago
    Correct. Aatsmyles was mistaken in relating the goodwill he/she described to accounting goodwill. In other words, aatsmyles shouldn't have used the phrase "account for" goodwill. Interestingly (at least to a weird human like me), there is something of a relationship between accounting goodwill and goodwill like the value of a brand. The reason why goodwill only shows up on a balance sheet after an acquisition is, I imagine, to follow the accounting principal of conservatism. Let's spice things up with a hypothetical. I'm going to make up some numbers here so don't go around telling people I revealed some privileged information on HN. Say you're Mr. McIlhenny, the() owner of a major private company called the McIlhenny Company. The McIlhenny Company's primary endeavor is selling a beloved hot sauce called Tabasco. On the income statement side, McIlhenny has revenues of $200 million and profits of $30 million. On the balance sheet, Tabasco has no liabilities (no long term debt, no payables, etc) and its only asset is cash, of which it has $1 million. Since (equity) = (assets) - (liabilities), this company has a "book value" of $1 million. You might notice that the book value seems absurd - a company that makes tens of millions of dollars a year and has a product with a major following would be a total steal of a purchase at $1 million! A few purchasers attempt to woo you, and they each make offers for about $100 million. You go with Carl Icahn's offer. Now, the company's book value is $100 million (the balance sheet has $1 million in cash and $99 million in goodwill on it). Clearly, the day before the acquisition, the company had roughly $99 million in "real" or "intrinsic" goodwill, but that didn't show up in the balance sheet. Why's that? One reason is conservatism. For many intangible assets, there's an art to choosing a number. If you let CEOs put in a goodwill number, many would probably throw in huge numbers as they vastly hype up the value of their brand and reputation. So, instead, we have a market approach to calculating goodwill by using transactions. However, accounting principals allow companies downwards. So the CEO of Nikola isn't allowed to turn his bogus claims into dollars on the goodwill line item, but he is allowed to reduce goodwill if he buys a battery manufacturer that turns out to be a fraud too. () It's owned by the McIlhenny family, but no need to complicate things
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Sorry, bro, if I'm selling a product, and part of my goal is to see "regular people" get a chance to buy it and get a decent price it's well within my rights to try methods to limit scalping, just like governments prevent gas/food overcharging during emergencies. Not everything is a "pure" market.
- deleted 5y ago
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evilDagmar 5y ago
No, the bots are the reason the goods are scarce. They are not a genuine indicator of scarcity, nor are they a part of genuine price discovery. That they still exists just shows that the bot operators are too small to attract the interest of regulatory agencies. ...yet.
- hamandcheese 5y ago
  > No, the bots are the reason the goods are scarce. It is possible that bots are creating artificial scarcity, but that would require either one bot to corner the market or collusion among enough bots to control prices. It seems equally plausible to me that RPIs would be scarce regardless.

fmajid 5y ago

All official RPi resellers are required to sell them without forced add-ons, at the list price. The scalper bots are trying to arbitrage that. I think a CAPTCHA in the ordering process would make more sense.

Scoundreller 5y ago
I wonder how much retail arbitrage is just leaks by the resellers themselves. But always better to blame scalpers. They can’t defend themselves if they don’t even exist.
- peterangular 5y ago
  > retail arbitrage is just leaks by the resellers themselves Anecdotal, but IMO lots... just depends on the industry. It's a good situation for someone to come along and buy up some or all of your risk - especially for stuff like ticket sales. Many corporations like Ticketmaster design around this, and bake this part of the supply chain into their pricing/experience.
AussieWog93 5y ago
>I think a CAPTCHA in the ordering process would make more sense. There was another thread here a while back where someone shared their experience writing sneaker scalping bots. Apparently, CAPTCHA tokens are valid for a minute or so, so this guy would solve heaps of them just before the form went live and cache the validation tokens. Then, when the form went live, the real humans who didn't have cached CAPTCHA tokens would be slowed down even more. Net result is that the botters ended up getting an even greater share of the supply than without CAPTCHAs.
- peterangular 5y ago
  > Apparently, CAPTCHA tokens are valid for a minute or so, so this guy would solve heaps of them just before the form went live and cache the validation tokens. I mean there's whole services like 2captcha that give you a 24/7 on-demand API for this, and for some of their offerings/solvers there are specifically real human robots on the other end doing the CAPTCHA. 2captcha works very very well to the point that CAPTCHA is a very much solved problem especially for the popular services like Google's reCAPTCHA.

throwaway81523 5y ago

Sometimes the bots are just because people want the items for themselves. I know of some companies that bought 1000s of disk drives for their data centers that way from retailers, back when there was a drive shortage a few years ago.

evilDagmar 5y ago
Except they were buying them for their own use and protecting against supply chain interruptions, not buying them to sell them to other consumers at artificially-inflated rates.