It's not really NVidia's fault. The problem is that you can buy a GPU for $1000 and use it to print $2000 of money. That's annoying because most people just want to play a computer game, not print $2000 worth of money.

The other thing NVidia could do is keep all their GPUs for themselves and mine crypto.

> The other thing NVidia could do is keep all their GPUs for themselves and mine crypto.

Who says they are not already doing that in some capacity?

That sounds like a lot of work, and a PR nightmare if the public ever found out.

Nvidia is already a money printing machine, and their margins are growing. I doubt it’s worth the time investment and risk exposure to the crypto markets for Nvidia. Better off using that time a money inventing better money printers.

Why would you start digging for gold if you are already becoming rich producing and selling the shovels?

I guess it's easier to make a shovel than it is to make a GPU, and it's easier to do industrial-scale crypto mining for a company that already owns a datacenter than it is to build an industrial earth processing operation. If NVidia wanted to mine a lot of coins, they no doubt have a few employees that could get that started. But it doesn't seem like they want to, perhaps because it's not a sustainable business or perhaps because their customers are already mad at them and they don't want to make it worse. (Though it's not really their fault that customers are mad at them; they're actually mad that someone invented cryptocurrency, which is not NVidia's fault.)

Ok, but like, would their overall reputation be higher if they were to directly put some proportion of their inventory up for auction (like, each item individually, not like one auction for a bundle of a very large number of GPUs) instead?

No, but at least they are being enriched to invest in research and development instead of some arbitraging trolls that will spend it on hookers and blow.

No, the prices will still be comparable to scalper prices, and the cost-conscious consumer market will remember the company's price gouging when they make their next-generation purchase

This response was initially confusing to me, but thinking about it, I think it led me to realize that complaints about things like this are, essentially, an attempt at coordination among consumers, in order to collectively get a better deal.

If there were only a single consumer, a monopsony, they would have a large degree of influence on the price.

Building a public consensus on what prices are reasonable and what prices are "too high" allows for exerting similar pressures on the price, as if there were an organization which represented a large portion of the consumers and which would make a single decision for all of that portion (like, a purchasing union thing).

I hadn't realized this.