[mschuster91]

> Scalpers aren't powerful enough to create an artificial scarcity.

Of course they are. Back in ye olde days when GPU mining for bitcoin was still possible (basically, FPGAs were not widespread and ASICs not even on the horizon), the amount of people who bought out all usable GPUs and resold them on ebay was massive. It was almost impossible to get anything for months unless you were willing to pay many multiples the ordinary worth.

In concert and other event tickets it's even worse. Some tickets have been known to sell at 20x markups, Rammstein concerts or Wacken tickets are usually outsold in a matter of hours and end up on ebay the day after.

[cbozeman]

> In concert and other event tickets it's even worse. Some tickets have been known to sell at 20x markups, Rammstein concerts or Wacken tickets are usually outsold in a matter of hours and end up on ebay the day after.

That's because there's built-in scarcity by virtue of physical limitations of a venue.

If your stadium only holds 15,000 people, but your city has 11 million or more like, say, the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, you can easily find 15,000 metalheads. Probably an order of magnitude more.

People keep talking about "artificial scarcity" with these GPUs, but its not artificial. The foundries that make these are running at max capacity 24/7. They are trying to get these cards into the hands of the people that want them, there's just simply not enough foundries and capacity available.

There isn't some grand conspiracy in this case. In this case, this is the effect of increasing consolidation of the computer industry as a whole.

Look back the 1980s at the amount of hard disk manufacturers. There were easily 10+ companies... Western Digital, Seagate, Connon, Maxtor, Quantum, etc. Now what are there? Three? Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital?

[BlueTemplar]

This must mean that these concert tickets aren't being sold at market prices to start with...

Now, a much worse situation is for critical health products, like what happened with masks and hydroalcoholic gel during the start of Covid. Not surprising that the governments intervened and made scalping of that illegal, and relaxed some rules on their fabrication.

(But on the other hand the governments did some "scalping" themselves for the medical workers, by not only requisitioning masks, but also making propaganda about how masks weren't effective!)

[mschuster91]

> This must mean that these concert tickets aren't being sold at market prices to start with...

The "market" is more than just the price of goods sold, it's always also the environment. Events have to at least show some level of affordability for the common man or public backlash occurs.

Hardly anyone would go to a soccer match if the starting price for the ticket was in the four-digit range, any band that dared to put up scalper-market prices as base prices would be flamed to death as "elitist" by the media and the fans alike. I mean, people are already claiming that Wacken has gone too elite and Rammstein sold out to the rich.

Also, politics would intervene because many venues have been built entirely or largely with taxpayer money or the operation is supported by taxpayer money (tax credits, public transport, public parking).

[BlueTemplar]

I guess what they could do is to sell concert tickets as named lottery tickets, that way :

- they can keep the price of an individual ticket relatively cheap

- fairness is preserved

- they probably would still get more money than now, while scalping would be basically infeasible