>You would be making the product only available to those who can turn the highest profit from it and would lose the rest of your customer base to your competitor who is smart enough to not use an auction model

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.

That sounds like a one-shot model. Auctions for mass-produced goods would be per batch. Nullc's argument is that driving up the price of auctions would exhaust whatever cash pile the miners are sitting on faster, which means they would gobble up fewer harddrives than they will if the prices are kept low.

::sigh::

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".

You realize capitalism is a system for allocating scare goods, right? An auction model means manufacturers benefit directly, and unless they're in a cartel, the high prices incentivize them to increase production. We see this happen all the time in the oil marker with marginal producers entering and exiting the market. Without an auction, anyone lucky enough to win the HDD lottery will have the same incentive, only they'll sell it on ebay.

The problem is the network effect. With GPUs, substantial effort has been done to build products and tools on top of Nvidia's proprietary framework (CUDA). The community invested in a proprietary system under the understanding that Nvidia will supply the hardware and not monopolize this investment.

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?