I've worked with Big Retail execs before. They're old school and conservative (in the business sense).
In a smoke filled CES hotel room they shook hands on a deal of X for $Y, and that's how it's going to stay for the next decade.
2) Risk. These shortages and cryptocurrency demand spikes are a blip on the history of these companies. It'd be stupid to suddenly change their entire business models and retail relationships for something that could disappear next month.
As much as I believe cryptocurrency and hence mining is here to stay, I can't fault these companies for not believing the same and acting accordingly. Especially given the cycles of boom and bust that cryptocurrencies have gone through.
Also, remember when Martin Shkreli increased the price of an anti-parasitic drug by 5000%? That upset a lot of people, and arguably it's what put him in jail. Of course, HDDs are not quite the same as vital medicine.
Yeah it’s bad for regular customers, but if there’s no supply then what would they be able to get anyway?
But for them, availability will also be limited, and next-term prices will get higher.
Also, increasing production of a highly-demanded item is not unheard of! But it will take months.
Auction sucks because it drives the price of goods up, but you know what's worse than prices going up? Prices going to infinity because they're out of stock.
The alternative is that the product is completely unavailable. This is currently the situation across a broad swath of GPUs. Every unit that becomes available is instantly snatched up, in some cases by people who've bribed the people doing stocking at the distributors.
That is asinine. Yes, auctioning the limited supply off is also obnoxious but it is a strictly no worse than being entirely unavailable. Auctioning it of also has the benefit of depleting the uncontrolled demand faster (which is often taking the form of 'buy $x million in parts, however much we can get'). It potentially helps expand the supply (though unfortunately lead times and tooling make it hard to expand supply for surge loads), and for some cases where paying an astronomical price would be justified it would preserve some access to the product.
But the main motivation for my suggestion is to deplete the resource of the parties buying 100% of the stock as quickly as possibly so that the market can get back to normal. If that doesn't work it's because the money fountain is simply too large, and at some point the increased revenue will justify increasing the supply (even though doing so is risky).
> Business models evolve toward efficiency, and there is a good reason no one is doing this.
Sorry, but that isn't how 'evolve towards' works. Sure, eventually. But this kind of demand is unusual and surprising, it presents new challenges. There may be good reasons why what I suggest wouldn't be a good idea but those reasons are not "if this were a good idea they'd already be doing it".
Should the community have divested from Nvidia's proprietary format and spread its resources on multiple platforms? Concentrating effort can benefit everyone, but it requires trust.
In addition, part of this community investment was funded by government research grants, adding a legal/public policy aspect to the issue. Should taxpayer money be spent on creating private, abusive, monopolies?
The demand from the cryptocurrency users will be extremely high until they've spent a particular amount in total. They can do that with 1000 units, or with 5000 units.
Obviously auctioning off units would be bad for having predictable prices for retail customers but that is irrelevant if aggressive miner buying is buying up all the supply.
Moreover, shareholders at the manufacturers should be demanding it: they're leaving money on the table.