Bora1114
Dabadger84
I blame all of them. lol Scalpers for making the situation worse, miners for making the situation worse (and both of them for making supply lower & demand higher), and NVidia for not producing a proper amount of cards before launch due to a rushed launch, not anticipating the demand, and further FUBARing it by not ramping production before launch either.
Let us not forget, NVidia said they were ramping up production in August - this is something that "normally" happens THREE MONTHS before a new GPU architecture is released. They did this on purpose because they were either too stupid, or too clueless to figure out what most of us knew was coming, unprecedented demand due to a combination of factors (everyone being home because of the pandemic, the performance making cards like the 3080 very desirable for the price, etc etc).
At the end of the day, there's plenty of blame to go around, and since science shows most people aren't happy unless they have something to complain about, step right up, take your pick and NOMNOMNOM that irritation. 
Good luck tomorrow everyone, I'm gonna shut down & see if my back is in a good enough mood for me to operate & get those thermal pads under the backplate & test'er out.
Its supply and demand. Nvidia knew the issue from the second they used large dies on a poor yielding manufacturing node in an environment with limited resources. They released a paper launch anyway giving high hopes to people instead of continuing production on more stable nodes with smaller dies. Its hard to blame AMD for shifting all production to CPUs and consoles when the majority of gamers do not buy their Gpus.
Scalpers do not cause supply and demand issues but are only a symptom of the price being lower than its demanded value. They are only more pronounced now that AMD and NVIDIA have largely cut off older die production. Bc there are not many older gpus being produced in the $200-$500 range, demand is shifting more towards the <200 and >500 range resulting in further demand on the 30 series.
Large miners upgrade every year, not just when crypto goes up. They either replace thekr existing systems or add on depending on the price. They create contracts with manufacturers and AIBs to buy cards in BULK at a given price. Nvidia knows the demand of this group and when it can be expected to grow given their contact with them. No industrial size miners are buying the 3090s lol.
Small miners mostly do not make up a large portion of purchases bc of limited capital and power requirements. They have to go through normal channels of purchasing so most end up buying cards at Scalper pricing. From those i know, this group buys about as many gpus as individual system builders. Everyone who kept an eye on crypto expected growth this year in mining which nvidia knew to a degree as well. I think i remember several tech tubers making comments about this midway last year.
I don't like the situation and I know they can't ramp production up in an instant but Nvidia knew these issues when choosing samsung. I made the mistake of thinking I could just wait for production so i didn't enter the queue system until dec. I'm not about to blame people for trying to make money where the supply isn't meeting the demand or people having preexisting contracts with Nvidia/AIBs. Sure you can blame the AIBs for taking these contracts but in business you dont tend to turn down easy money from multi year partners.
What could have been done differently? More people could have been buying AMD over the years so in situations like this they would have bought more 7nm cap at higher prices. Nvidia could have released a smaller Ampere in 2018 on 12nm with smaller dies since Turing was awful value. They could have rereleased this in 2020 on a smaller node while keeping the 12nm production. Even as things are, they could have just kept turing in production to fill demand but they chose to cut it in order to increase profit margins on the 30 series.
I think sometimes people throw around the "supply and demand" argument a little much. To say scalpers do not cause supply and demand issues is not really how you should look at it. Do they disrupt overall supply and demand? No, they don't. They just serve as pass through price gougers.
However, if you think of Supply as total supply available to consumers. And Demand as total demand for a product from end consumers, you see that both of these consist of three main consumer categories.
- Gamers, traditional or enthusiastic
- Scientific computing, to include miners, who may not be scientist themselves, but it's still at its core very math driven
- Scalpers
Scalpers have both demand requirements, they need cards to sell. And supply requirements, they can only buy what is available. They have a third unique relationship, they cut out X total supply from groups 1 & 2, and then sell them that that chunk of supply at hugely marked up prices. Your retailers don't do that, manufacturers don't do that.
You think guy out there buying up multiple cards and reselling them is somehow one of the millions most smart people that manufacturers or retailers don't know about? No, he's a grey area price gouger who doesn't have to care about contracts, customer backlash, and / or government attention. I think the more this happens, the more you'll see at least the government eye these practices. It's too much money at this point not to.
You are somewhat incorrect to say they have no effect, because they are part of the demand side. Fine, but when they want to unload supply side, you don't want this
SupplyScalper <= DemandGamer + DemandSci, where SupplyScalper is relatively high
What we need to do is make sure that when SupplyScalper is relatively high
SupplyScalper >> DemandGamerFromScalper + DemandSciFromScalper, where DemandFromScalperTotal total is close to zero. Scalpers eat billions of dollars and stop scalping. This would stop scalping.
Buying from scalpers hurts the ecosystem (and by scalper, I don't mean someone reselling a card they no longer need, it's the big time profiteers of this mess)