It’s not a waste, but it’s not best allocation either. It seems like the chips will go to established players with large and cheap credit lines and ossify the market even more.
The scalpers are not like market makers who are regulated, provide both bid and ask, and whose spread is usually quite small in comparison to scalpers.
Credit is cheap, and there's no particular barrier to entry (unless we're talking about things like backroom deals with concert promoters, which I'm sure does happen, but isn't an essential part of the business), so I'd expect this to be a fairly competitive market.
> The scalpers are not like market makers who are regulated, provide both bid and ask, and whose spread is usually quite small in comparison to scalpers.
Market maker regulation is relatively recent, and market making is recognised as having served a beneficial function long before that. Many of these ticket sites do list bid prices for your tickets as well. The spread is pretty wide compared to listed equities that trade hundreds of times a second, sure, but if you compare a single concert's ticket with a stock or bond that trades at a similar rate (which would be, like, the bottom end of the pink sheets) it's not so bad.
It's not "waste", it's the people who are willing to spend the most money, which are presumably the people who want/need the thing most, so it's better than allocating the thing at random.
> And why should this involve people spending more money, and all the delta going to the person who was first in line or in lucky position to secure a loan and buy off all the supply?
The person who makes a good judgement about what things are underpriced is selling a service to the market and earning their cut. A seller who's paying attention should see the rush and raise their prices (and ideally increase production to match that).