Adafruit requires 2FA to prevent bots buying out Raspberry Pi

https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/03/17/verified-accounts-secured-with-2fa-for-some-high-demand-products/

by 7402 • 4 years ago

303 234 4 years ago

blog.adafruit.com

syntheticnature• 4 years ago

Clever way to become the site of first resort for makers and engineers.

ephbit• 4 years ago

What's this about?

Are the bots operated to manipulate the market, by buying up the whole supply to then sell at a higher price?

dljsjr• 4 years ago

I guess you could call it market manipulation but it's more just resellers/scalpers trying to take advantage of the chip shortage. RPis have always been in high demand and often were backordered even when things were fine; now they're supply constrained enough that scalpers can buy up in bulk and resell at high markup, similar to the GPU aftermarket going on right now.

jason-phillips• 4 years ago

Yes, in many industries.

teeray3• 4 years ago

The bots are middlemen that ensure proper pricing of scarce goods. Their commission is the difference between the retail price and the actual market price.

fartcannon• 4 years ago

Vultures, parasites, vampires.

dymk• 4 years ago

The bots ensure that steps are taken such that scares goods are distributed in a manner better than "whoever can pay the most".

RPis have, and will continue to be, aimed at education and enrichment, and the makers/retailers will take steps to ensure that as many people as possible can get ahold of them at a low price.

ryandrake• 4 years ago

Not sure why you're getting DV'ed. If a product is priced such that it is actually profitable to have bots buy it (and presumably re-sell), then it's priced incorrectly and the bots are a corrective market force.

If a gas station started selling gasoline at half price, it would be instantly overrun with everyone from Harry with his pickup truck full of jerry cans to empty tanker trucks.

jterrys• 4 years ago

The world isn't a stock market simulation.

Karellen• 4 years ago

It's a roundabout way of stating the 55th rule of acquisition, but I'll allow it.

Or is it the 110th?

(The 140th and 144th also seem relevant here.)

atsmyles• 4 years ago

This is true. However, it is not the whole story.

0. Adafruit cannot raise prices of rpis due to contract.

1. Adafruit makes the same amount of money regardless of who buys the product.

2. It is in the incentive of Adafruit to increase it's customers good will. It is considered an asset for Adafruit (Companies account for this via 'Good Will').

3. People generally don't like scalpers, "Scalpers bad"

4. By providing means to avoid scalpers, they are capturing some of the profit that scalpers would be making and converting it to a 'Good Will' asset, "Adafruit Good"

5. 'Good Will' + money > money

Thank you for participating in economic analysis.

stjohnswarts2• 4 years ago

Sorry, bro, if I'm selling a product, and part of my goal is to see "regular people" get a chance to buy it and get a decent price it's well within my rights to try methods to limit scalping, just like governments prevent gas/food overcharging during emergencies. Not everything is a "pure" market.

evilDagmar3• 4 years ago

No, the bots are the reason the goods are scarce. They are not a genuine indicator of scarcity, nor are they a part of genuine price discovery. That they still exists just shows that the bot operators are too small to attract the interest of regulatory agencies. ...yet.

fmajid• 4 years ago

All official RPi resellers are required to sell them without forced add-ons, at the list price. The scalper bots are trying to arbitrage that.

I think a CAPTCHA in the ordering process would make more sense.

Scoundreller• 4 years ago

I wonder how much retail arbitrage is just leaks by the resellers themselves.

But always better to blame scalpers. They can’t defend themselves if they don’t even exist.

AussieWog933• 4 years ago

I think a CAPTCHA in the ordering process would make more sense.

There was another thread here a while back where someone shared their experience writing sneaker scalping bots. Apparently, CAPTCHA tokens are valid for a minute or so, so this guy would solve heaps of them just before the form went live and cache the validation tokens.

Then, when the form went live, the real humans who didn't have cached CAPTCHA tokens would be slowed down even more.

Net result is that the botters ended up getting an even greater share of the supply than without CAPTCHAs.

bradly2• 4 years ago

FWIW I missed reservations to a national park because I use Firefox and Google made me click traffic lights and buses for thirty seconds before being able to continue.

throwaway815233• 4 years ago

Sometimes the bots are just because people want the items for themselves. I know of some companies that bought 1000s of disk drives for their data centers that way from retailers, back when there was a drive shortage a few years ago.

evilDagmar3• 4 years ago

Except they were buying them for their own use and protecting against supply chain interruptions, not buying them to sell them to other consumers at artificially-inflated rates.

alexk307• 4 years ago

Good. Supply is so limited right now, but everyone should be able to get one at MSRP if they want one. The whole goal of the Pi project is to make computers affordable to enable learning and prototyping. I pre-ordered a Pi 4 about 3 months ago, and I should receive it this week if I'm lucky.

avian• 4 years ago

The whole goal of the Pi project is to make computers affordable to enable learning and prototyping

Is it still though? They have been pushing into various industrial and commercial markets. There was talk about Raspberry Pi Trading planning an IPO this year [1].

There are companies now that are basing their entire product lines around Raspberry Pi's Compute Modules. This then drives demand for other Raspberry Pi products as well. When you're deeply invested into that ecosystem you also need Pis 3s and 4s for builds, testing, development, etc.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29392649

samwillis4• 4 years ago

An IPO of Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd would unlock a lot of funds for the Raspberry Pi Foundation which could be reinvested into further educational activities. It’s probably a good move for the original mission of the foundation.

2xpress2• 4 years ago

Indeed, RP 4 with 8 GB is a very powerful versatile product, needed for all kinds of industrial and commercial uses, where it would in turn build more value for the rest of society, generating wealth. Attempting to restrict this product to only some specific privileged group will not only be futile, but harmful to the whole society, including that privileged group, as the wealth that could be generated will not be.

The current big problem is that 2 years of Coronavirus pandemic and the active Russian beligerance have created unprecedented economic disruption, effectively ending the prosperous times following WWII. We are no longer living in the same world, and expecting things to be cheap and plentiful is no longer a practical frame of mind.

The best known way to allocate meager resources for best possible use is not to interfere with the free market. And anybody who disagrees and tries to do otherwise will learn this fundamental the hard way.

It is too bad that there is really no viable alternative to RP. The current competitors do not provide good ongoing support and are only compatible with specific versions of the Linux kernel, or modified versions of the Linux kernel. I suppose eventually a credible competitor will rise up maintaining good support, without any fair price manipulation BS, and with less weird hardware quirks, and everybody will just switch over to that platform.

calvinmorrison• 4 years ago

Good. Supply is so limited now, prices should go up

NowhereMan• 4 years ago

Looks like you can use OATH TOTP, which can be easily automated. I don't understand how this is an effective countermeasure against bots.

samwillis4• 4 years ago

This ads friction to the process of automating the buying process. Preventing bots is an endless cat and mouse game, every protection you put in place will be circumvented eventually. You just have to keep changing tactics and adding new layers. That’s what they are doing here.

Realistically the best protection that they could put in place is a rate/qty limit on the credit card being used. It can still be automated by using stolen cards, or one of the services that instantly creates new card numbers for you. But again it adds friction.

Also limiting the number of orders to delivery addresses would be a easy mitigation.

It wouldn’t surprise me if they are doing both of those already though.

wyager• 4 years ago

This seems like an especially trivial-to-bypass mitigation.

colechristensen5• 4 years ago

A lot of bots are written by really unsophisticated people though, often just following online guides. Raising the bar lowers the number of adversaries.

You can never eliminate the risk, but it's just one more point of friction which is also a not-so-unreasonable speed bump to enable for real users.

b11210• 4 years ago

Maybe, but, no one gets my mobile number, not my bank, no one.

It's not in my name, I pay cash for it, I share my contacts with no one, etc.

I won't have it linked to me, and with how you can so readily be location tracked when someone knows your number, I am astonished so many people give it out.

So there goes the easiest 2fa....

devwastaken• 4 years ago

Most people do not write bots. One person writes a bot, thousands use it. The user just enters a few values.

im3w1l• 4 years ago

And even if someone can do it, it may raise the cost enough to make it not worth it.

udia• 4 years ago

I agree, 2FA seems unrelated to stopping bots. It really seems like some form of rate limiting and captcha should have been used instead.

cft• 4 years ago

https://2captcha.com/

londons_explore2• 4 years ago

Perhaps for buying a ras-pi specifically, they'll require SMS verification.

SMS is hard to create large numbers of fake accounts because getting access to large numbers of phone numbers that aren't all in the same block is pretty hard.

pauldd7• 4 years ago

There are several services that offer exactly this for 6-20 cents per verification, with a wide variety of numbers and geos, VOIP or Real ATT/Verizon Mobile etc, and easy to use API's.

evan_• 4 years ago

You're misreading, you have to "verify" your account first as well as set up MFA.

Verifying just consists of confirming your email via a one-time token. Setting up MFA presumably just makes sure there's no impetus to hack a bunch of old accounts.

snapetom• 4 years ago

For anyone confused in setting this up, the App is Twilio Authy in the Apple App Store. The logo in the app store has little contrast and the Adafruit blog post just calls it "Authy" which returns dozens of 2FA apps.

azinman22• 4 years ago

You can use any 2FA app such as 1Password

cheeze• 4 years ago

It's just oauth totp. You can use whatever 2fa authenticator you want. I like the one built into BitWarden personally.

Authy works fine too (there is a good authenticator app that is actually called Authy)

Izkata• 4 years ago

and the Adafruit blog post just calls it "Authy"

Twilio acquired Authy in 2015, but didn't put their brand on it until a year or two ago, so a lot of people just call it "Authy" out of habit/without knowing Twilio owns it.

ohyeshedid• 4 years ago

*OTP isn't much of a barrier. SMS would've increased the cost a little more. Both easily automated. I know retailers are trying to fight the tide, but they're going to need more than teacups.

nothasan2• 4 years ago

Pretty easy to automate this

Seattle3503• 4 years ago

I'm surprised they didn't require Phone # verification given the issue they are having.

paxys• 4 years ago

How does 2FA stop bots?

cinntaile4• 4 years ago

Fixed pricing with scarce goods tends to lead to this result, just let supply and demand sort it out and this problem wouldn't exist. Trying to fix this by using 2FA won't change much, it's just an arms race where each side keeps investing more and more money into fixing a problem that doesn't have to exist in the first place.

samwillis4• 4 years ago

just let supply and demand sort it out and this problem wouldn't exist

That would go against the mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation which is to promote computer science education. Accessibility though low prices is an important aspect of that.

Not all problems are solved with free markets.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi_Foundation

Ajedi323• 4 years ago

Lowering prices doesn't make the product more "accessible" if you can't supply enough to keep up with demand at that price. It just turns the purchasing process into a lottery rather than a bidding war. I can't say I find the former process any more in line with the Pi foundation's stated goals than the latter.

cinntaile4• 4 years ago

Yes the free market can't solve everything, but we still have to wait for the free market to solve the supply chain issues before this situation will improve. They could temporarily let go of their fixed pricing rule in the meantime.

eikenberry• 4 years ago

Are they selling them at a loss? If not then the market would work fine, they just need to increase production. Maybe they'll make enough money to give some to students that way.

lvass• 4 years ago

There's just no way to look into this and not think they are doing an absolute shit job. A raspberry pi 4 costs the equivalent of 200 US Dollars in Brazil, more than some brand new laptops. Most of our population do not have computers, RPi avaliability would be awesome for us.

Allowing some people in some countries to get it for $35 is just the lazy solution. I'd be glad to pay $50, because I'm able to. Put in some effort so the ones who really need it can get it cheap. Sell it at real market value for the rest of us. Doing good things require effort.

colechristensen5• 4 years ago

There are a lot of people who want to play arbitrage with rare goods, if you have enough money you can do it with just about anything. It is perfectly fair to want your market segment to be to deliver cheap rare goods to people without many resources.

Sometimes arbitrage helps make efficient markets, other times it is just a drag on the economy. It is perfectly fair for a provider to not want to only provide goods to people with many resources or scalpers.

RPi is also just not a good deal if it is significantly more expensive, there are lots of more expensive options out there for small computers which have better specs and are more readily available.

cinntaile4• 4 years ago

It is perfectly fair for a provider to not want to only provide goods to people with many resources or scalpers.

Yes but I doubt this will achieve that goal, at most it'll work for a couple of weeks. Also I very much doubt that RPis are being bought by financially disadvantaged people to learn valuable computing skills. These things are bought by people wanting to automate something at home, they're usually well off. Schools and training centres don't buy via the Adafruit retail channel.

teeray3• 4 years ago

RPi is also just not a good deal if it is significantly more expensive

Then the price will fall to the point where it’s a good deal, but still more expensive than what it is now.

Maybe it’s not the $5 Pi Zero anymore, but $50 might not be too bad.

zozbot234• 4 years ago

As others have pointed out, AdaFruit likely cannot raise their selling price for these Pi's due to prior contractual arrangements. They're essentially forced to ration their supply, and all they can do is make the best of a pretty bad situation by at least trying to act fair (i.e. limited buys only) and rewarding their existing customers with preferential access.

tormock2• 4 years ago

ESP8266s can be used for a lot of things that people use RPi for... and they are a lot cheaper.

I just sold 2 used RPi that I bought ~10 years ago for more then what I paid for them brand new...

n4bz0r2• 4 years ago

I've been wondering about that myself, but then it's occured to me that there are very poor countries where kids simply don't have access to no computers at all. The appeal of Pi in this situation is that you can program and prototype on the thing, and it's relatively affordable (well, at least it is supposed to be). For ESPs you'd need a separate device to write and upload the code.

tormock2• 4 years ago

yeah, ESPs aren't general purpose computers but they are still very capable (I used one as a "router" before to create a network in my car: https://github.com/martin-ger/esp_wifi_repeater)

cjcampbell• 4 years ago

Glad they took this step to slow down the bots. The situation has been rough since rpilocator.com came along. I haven’t been able to complete a purchase since the week it hit HN.

I use the pi for teaching, and could previously pick one up every couple weeks just by signing up for stock notifications. I was in the middle of a purchase in February when rpilocator updated to show stock and Adafruit went offline due to the traffic surge. The disruption lasted about half an hour.

geerlingguy• 4 years ago

It was rough before rpilocator came along. It just highlighted how difficult it is to find any Pis in stock.

philjohn• 4 years ago

Will this slow down the bots? It's just an extra (simple) hoop to jump through, TOTP is easy to implement.

vmception8• 4 years ago

What Adidas did was release 30,000 NFTs and require proof of current possession of one of the NFTs (colloquially called 'ownership', just hoping to avoid a semantics discussion) to gain access to the purchase of some new merchandise.

If bots were not in the sale then they will not be able to purchase the merchandise. Bots can purchase one of the NFTs from someone else usually at a premium, to participate. The bot developer needs to do some additional coding.

In any case, the merchandise buyers now get to feel like its more fair, even with the presence of potential bots buyers, since a stake was placed. The market has priced the NFTs based on how much they think the subsequent merchandise will resale for. Currently these are worth $4,300 and Adidas initially sold them for $800 and at least $84,000,000 in volume over 4 months.

Adidas gets the proceeds of the initial NFT sale, a commission from the NFT resales ("royalties"), as well as the proceeds from selling the merchandise.

It's a form of an additional factor.

shkkmo5• 4 years ago

I sure hope more companies don't adopt this sort of gatekeeping, that sounds awful for the people who actually want to wear the shoes and great for the speculators who are abusing that demand to make money.

If you have limited runs that you want to sell fairly and maximize profit on, why not just do a regular auction?

criddell2• 4 years ago

What you call gatekeeping, Adidas would probably call price discovery.

vmception8• 4 years ago

I think what you're missing is that Adidas and many streetware companies have already gone decades without acknowledging that their purchasers for certain merchandise are scalpers and speculators.

Its a massive scene that has grown by orders of magnitude over the last decade like many other scenes.

The only thing new here is that adidas finally acknowledged it.

kelnos4• 4 years ago

I don't think it's ever "fair" when bots buy scarce things that humans want. (Assuming, here, that the bot owners are buying for speculation, and not for personal use. I think it's a little more grey, but more or less ok, when an individual writes a bot so they can snag a single unit of something that they want.) Putting the sale behind NFT possession (where a bot could purchase the NFT in the first place) doesn't really change anything.

Adidas' NFT scheme just acts to inflate the price, which is probably fine for a limited luxury good; certainly Adidas would rather capture more value per sale than leave that value to speculators/resellers. But for something like a Raspberry Pi, an end-user being able to acquire one for $35 is a key part of its appeal. If they're "bid" up to several hundred dollars through this auction-like NFT scheme, that defeats the purpose.

While I'm not sure 2FA is the most effective way to weed out bots (maybe it is, I don't know), I think it's perfectly reasonable to try to set up a marketplace where all buyers are individuals who are buying the product for their own use, and aren't scaplers/speculators. These latter sorts of people are just parasites and usually provide no real value.

tuxoko• 4 years ago

How does it change anything other than Adidas getting the profit of inflated price? And if Adidas has an idea of how the resale price would look like to price their NFT, why don't they just price that into the shoes themselves?

vmception8• 4 years ago

Adidas and many companies don't raise the MSRP specifically because they know they have a price sensitive audience and reputation. This gives them plausible deniability about the real demand and more accurate market based pricing, the ability to sell an additional product and financial exposure to the volume in the secondary market anyway.

Correct, they get to profit off the inflated price, and they finally get to acknowledge their speculator purchasers who they've been ignoring for decades. The speculator purchasers feel like they have a more even playing field.

advisedwang• 4 years ago

What stops automation of grabbing the initial NFT release?

vmception8• 4 years ago

Nothing and that wasn't the goal, current owners of the NFT can also develop bots for when the merchandise is released for purchase. It just limits the size of the participant pool, how many bots are being competed against and shows what those bot owners would be willing to pay for access because of what they think they can resell the merchandise for.

Adidas previously never had exposure to the secondary market of its goods, now it does and it also discovers the price at which people want to buy and sell at. Individuals can attempt to buy NFTs from the bot owner, the bot owner might have a price. If they do, the individual gets the NFT and can buy the merch. In all scenarios, Adidas makes some commission.

nothasan2• 4 years ago

There was two stages for that sale (possession requirement + public). And someone was still able to automate and purchase 1% of the entire supply.

chmod6002• 4 years ago

What's the background here? Why is this model so popular? Are previous models a viable alternative for some? How long until production can catch up?

wnevets• 4 years ago

It seems like online scalping in general has skyrocketed since the pandemic started in 2020, the most famous probably being GPU cards.

stjohnswarts2• 4 years ago

And the ubiquitous ticket scalper bots.

chmod6002• 4 years ago

I was interested to hear more about why this model is so exciting. Any thoughts, or just faster/better?

noobermin• 4 years ago

It's across the board, with GPUs, things like these pis, retro games and accessories even, it's pretty annoying.

Thankfully necessities like TP and masks are no longer being scalped but it's still happening in electronics.

sbierwagen• 4 years ago

Scalping happens when the list price is lower than the market price.

Nobody scalps shares of Alphabet, because the price floats. Merchants don't want to increase list prices, because they'll get yelled at, so instead they run out of stock and middlemen collect the arbitrage price. If you don't like it, tell stores to increase prices, and tell CNN to stop running stories about how awful greedy businessmen are causing inflation purely out of spite.

qbasic_forever• 4 years ago

This is the first Pi with 4 or 8 gigabytes of memory, and the ability to boot off a USB drive natively (like a SSD). It can easily replace a big desktop computer with a tiny ~$50 board. It is not a slow and semi-unreliable little computer like the previous models (Raspberry Pi 3 and below).

The Pi 3 only has 1GB of memory and is pretty much unusable for modern desktop use (especially browsing the web today). In addition with only a micro SD card as primary storage it's super slow and prone to brick itself if you aren't careful about powering it up and down cleanly.

dzhiurgis• 4 years ago

I've recently sold my 2-3 yr old unused RPI and made a profit, thats insane.

lagrange77• 4 years ago

Maybe these are just some pitiful injured robots, trying to get hold of some spare parts for self repair. :'(

atlgator• 4 years ago

Is there a particular use case making the Pi 4 so in demand?

hashkb2• 4 years ago

I don't understand what's so hard about this problem - if you have a platform that's impacted by bots and scalpers, and if you want to do the right thing, or give the appearance of doing the right thing with almost no cost to yourself or your business, you should release your product in a fair lottery with reasonable purchase limits.

You have plenty of time before the product is released to register and verify everyone. You completely avoid traffic issues. Accounting is easy - you'll sell out when you run the lottery. You'll build a reputation for releasing inventory fairly and without causing undue stress on your customers, and avoid the suspicion that you're in cahoots with the scalpers (looking at you, Ticketmaster).

I'm accustomed to stressing out over concert tickets and struggling to get gaming consoles, and have a deep hatred of scalpers and the platforms that enable them, but I had no idea that scalpers were ruining the educational/hobby markets too. That seems really low.

ineedasername7• 4 years ago

What about stuffing the lottery box with countless bot-created accounts entering the lottery?

hashkb2• 4 years ago

You'd have a lot more time to find and boot them prior to running the lottery. Assuming you didn't/couldn't detect them, at least you spare your users the anxiety and inconvenience of the on-sale while they get screwed.

digitallyfree• 4 years ago

As an aside, used thin clients and industrial PCs are a good x86 alternative to the Pi if you require similar performance and don't need GPIO. They are quite plentiful on ebay, include a housing, and consume little power.

bradly2• 4 years ago

Maybe now is now a good time to sell all my Pi's I bought through-out the years with good intentions of building something one day.

largbae• 4 years ago

Indeed. Once you start, you won't stop

adolph• 4 years ago

Adafruit does have stock of Pi Zero WH in the form of Google AIY vision kit. Kinda spendy for what it is tho.

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3780

n4bz0r2• 4 years ago

Given one of the goals of the project is to allow young people to have an affordable PC to learn linux and programming, it would make sense to reserve a part of the stock for verified students (or teachers) at MSRP.

amelius• 4 years ago

Better let the bots through, let them pay, then say that the items are on backorder.

:)

charcircuit2• 4 years ago

If you want to prevent scalpers just sell the new units that come into stock in a reverse auction. Start the price at $500 and lower the price by a dollar every minute. Once all of the stock is sold out you charge everyone the price the last unit was sold for.

In this system bots don't have an advantage over humans. Humans can preinput what they are willing to pay and there will be no race against bots like what you see here.

ineedasername7• 4 years ago

Selling above MSRP without legitimate expenses to justify it still means the retailer is willing to sacrifice the RPi mission. Your proposal is not bad as a "price discovery" methodology but it does run counter to the RPi mission if it sells above their desired price.

cinntaile4• 4 years ago

Isn't a reverse auction just another price discovery mechanism? Why is it superior?

charcircuit2• 4 years ago

If supply is plentiful the price goes to the floor (MSRP). If there is not enough supply it is sold at a price that is as small as possible while allowing people who want it the most to get it (using the money they are willing to spend on it as a proxy for how badly they want it). If you are still worried about the mission the extra revenue could go towards a fund that helps people in need in regards to buying one.

TrackerFF• 4 years ago

Or maybe some dynamic / demand based pricing. When bots start competing againt each other, price shoots up.

TrevorFSmith• 4 years ago

If you have an RPi that you're not using then be a hero and offer it to your maker friends.

ineedasername7• 4 years ago

I have 2 or 3 RPi 2 models and an RPi 3. Any thoughts on how I could get it into good hands not looking to scalp them? The local schools don't need them.

dawnerd• 4 years ago

I don't know why this is so hard for retailers to figure out. Valve has an excellent system. Let me give you a down payment, five dollars, ten, whatever. Put my name on a list and when its my turn to buy give me a few days to purchase, and if not refund and move on to the next person.

It's like all these retailers forgot backordering was a thing.

They could even store the address and limit to one order per x period of time.

kelnos4• 4 years ago

Yeah, this has been really frustrating for me, too. I've been trying to buy a Compute Module 4, and everyone is sold out of that as well. I'd be perfectly happy to even pay the full price to place a backorder, and just wait for them to ship it to me whenever my order hits the top of the list. I don't want to keep checking daily to see if anyone has something, and then click through to each of 5 different retailers to only find out that they've sold out again in the time it's taken me to click through. It's such a waste of time.

leguminous• 4 years ago

As far as I know, you can place a backorder with Newark or Allied.

batch12• 4 years ago

Or increase the price for the bots detected to a few thousand dollars

mwint• 4 years ago

Hah, I love the idea of doing this. Detect a bot, change the price and put a big banner up that says “hey, human, click here to pay $40 instead of $4000”. Only works once or twice before bots would catch on and check the price, but I bet a ton of auto-order bots don’t currently.

Then write it up and get that sweet HN karma for defending the Pi supply.

monkeybutton• 4 years ago

Ticket scalpers use pools of credit cards to make purchases. What's to stop botters from using pools of CCs+phone numbers?

jimmydorry• 4 years ago

Unique shipping addresses are typically harder to circumvent (but not impossible)

rtpg• 4 years ago

Bots then buy them up?? Back ordering has the same problem as everything else that is first come first serve.

My fav thing is combining “purchase intent” with “has bought at store before” and just allowing people with purchase histories at the store to buy, and 1 per person.

Also just lotteries work alright, if only cuz you add enough weird friction to make it rough.

MarcScott• 4 years ago

CPC are a major supplier and accept backorders - https://cpc.farnell.com/raspberry-pi/rpi4-modbp-4gb/raspberr...

yahn003• 4 years ago

Retailer gets paid whether it’s you or someone else buying. Why invest in system upgrades?

SixDouble53214• 4 years ago

Why not sell them directly on the secondary market and pocket the markup?

Why even bother selling them yourself and cultivate a community of scalper to maximize profit and take a cut.

Then buy the suppliers and only make enough to keep them scarce and expensive.

Don't stop there, buy competitor wares and put them in the landfill since they aren't running any schemes.

I think it boils down to: profit isn't the only motivation for doing a thing.

Nsida3• 4 years ago

I ordered a RPi CM4 about 5 months ago. They charged me the full price and I’m still waiting for the delivery.

abc123yeet• 4 years ago

They can have my old ones

jzer0cool• 4 years ago

What might be in the pi 4 that it is being bought out? Is there just a limited supply at the moment?

jimrandomh• 4 years ago

Just raise the price already. The market price of a Pi Zero 2W is about $70 right now. For my application, I'm happy to pay it, because the alternative would be spending a month of skilled developer time designing a daughterboard and porting software to a different SBC. If Adafruit actually succeeded in preventing scalpers from buying up the supply, this would mean misallocating boards to projects where a dozen other boards would have worked just as well.

2xpress2• 4 years ago

Indeed, if the demand exceeds the supply then the prices have to go up. This way more money will be available for the manufacturer to increase the supply. This is the basic law of economics, and anybody trying to play games around it will only make things worse and end up in poverty.

throwaway815233• 4 years ago

What were you doing building a product(?) around a 02W anyway? They are supposed to be 1 per person, like the old 0 series. They have never been offered in quantity even when there wasn't a shortage.

savant_penguin• 4 years ago

Maybe I'm being naive here, but why is it so hard to just make more?

ineedasername7• 4 years ago

A reasonable question, but also a simple answer: we're in a global chip shortage.

gnulinux• 4 years ago

We're in the middle of a huge chip shortage. All kinds of semiconductor materials are very expensive nowadays due to low supply. Companies like Pi simply can't find enough material.

danbr• 4 years ago

Confused how 2FA prevents bots from ordering.

What’s stopping someone from setting up a verified account and automating a 2FA order process? Unless there is an additional purchase limit?

FateOfNations• 4 years ago

It doesn't outright prevent it, but it does make it more complicated, puting it out of the skill range for a decent chunk of the bot operators.

barbazoo• 4 years ago

Wouldn't a recaptcha be a much more robust way to prevent bots from ordering?

iJohnDoe• 4 years ago

Sorry for an obvious question.

What is the current situation that requires anyone to use a bot to buy a Pi? Why is a Pi so important today?

FrenchDevRemote• 4 years ago

This is incredibly stupid, it's really easy to handle 2FA with a bot.(as easy as making the bot in the first place, or even easier...)

fomine3• 4 years ago

I thought they adopt SMS 2FA that is somewhat reasonable. But they chose TOTP, lol. Just copy pasta TOTP generator on bot. It gives bots advantage.

harryvederci• 4 years ago

If I'm not mistaken, the Raspberry Pi was meant to be an affordable device for educational purposes. Now bots are buying them, making them scarce, making them less affordable.

Could licensing help here? What if the Raspberry Pi Foundation would sell devices with a license that says you can't sell it for more than a certain price, and you can only sell it / give it away under the same license?

krageon• 4 years ago

What would that license do? How would it be enforced? Not at all, in which case such rules are bad.

Havoc• 4 years ago

I’ve got like 3 pi4s lying around mostly idle that I bought before supply/demand went insane. Maybe I should list them somewhere if there is so much demand

Adafruit requires 2FA to prevent bots buying out Raspberry Pi

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