Adafruit requires 2FA to prevent bots buying out Raspberry Pi
blog.adafruit.com
blog.adafruit.com
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.
They even confirmed manually via email if I really really really wanted to place the backorder
Now I just need to wait until October for my CM4 to ship... :(
Then write it up and get that sweet HN karma for defending the Pi supply.
There were a number of scenarios to consider (there was a "probability score" involved), but the biggest one is: "How big is the plot of land at address XYZ. Is it in an urban, suburban, or rural area? Is the existing building a house, commercial building, or skyscraper? Does this unit buy products of this type in bulk?"
Easier than you think. Note that the score had hundreds of factors. These were the easiest to consider.
(In most states, you could pull public info and tell right away if an address has multiple legitimate units or not FYI)
Default address: The address you entered was found but more information is needed (such as an apartment, suite, or box number) to match to a specific address.
Verify API, page 11
https://www.usps.com/business/web-tools-apis/general-api-dev...
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.
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.
Diverting from the pipeline that works for them is in your interest not theirs.
First world whiners; this graphics card QQing is approaching “I can’t get a haircut.” levels of cringe. HN thinks it’s so much more respectable and mature than Reddit, though. Still a bunch of first worlders moaning about reality not serving them just so.
This is how your culture has always worked; any one of us is not especially important to it. You want to roll that way? Put up a website to do so, work a deal with nVidia or AMD to be that pipeline.
Not sure what this is in reply to, my post answers why a person may do something with no profit. Not everyone is an asshole.
You want someone else to do what you aren’t. That’s not how it works. Prove its worth on the market.
I’m not saying that’s ideal, I’m saying that’s how it’s done, not through hoping and dreaming in the nooks and crannies of social media
You having continuity for two posts in a row would be a nice-to-have though.
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.
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.
It would also make every decision that the company makes from here going forward one of fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders. For a project rooted in affordable open-source hardware/software that's a major conflict of interest.
I get that "Raspberry Pi (Trading) Ltd" is not the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but it is wholly owned by the foundation as a subsidiary. IMO, it'd be of major concern if any RPI business entities went public.
Either way, your "as long as..." conditional statement may be logically consistent, but the condition is by no means guaranteed to be met.
Nonetheless, a lawsuit is possible as well. Foregoing profits in favor of ideology could conceivably be a breach of fiduciary responsibility, a primary cause of shareholder lawsuits. You may be right that there has never been a lawsuit like this about too-low prices, but I simply don't know. And unless you're a corporate lawyer with extensive shareholder lawsuit experience-- or happen to have some legal experience and a subscription to something like Westlaw-- then you are making an unfounded guess.
I have a friend w/ Westlaw access, among other databases, but I'm not willing to ask them to spend a few hours researching the issue to see if there's every been such a case, or try to find one myself. But in the history of corporate lawsuits it certainly wouldn't surprise me. There is a body of caselaw that could encompass it, predatory pricing (https://www.justice.gov/atr/predatory-pricing-strategic-theo...). Selling significantly below the market-clearing rate demonstrated by scalper prices might provide some ammunition for this claim, but IANAL so I won't speculate further on its actual applicability.
If you have more direct expertise or knowledge of the caselaw there I'm happy to hear it. I think, absent completely recalcitrant corporate leadership on the issue, shareholders would force the issue outside of the courtroom.
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.
But scalping is a totally separate issue. They provide fairly minimal value if any, to anyone but themselves, while raising prices for everyone.
I don't really see why a non profit organization should have to support a use case that is detrimental to many people.
The "free market" is a bad idea in scarcity times, as the only ones able to pay the profiteering prices will be the rich and wasteful, and ordinary society is left behind. Just look at the PC market where shitcoin miners have completely ruined the supply chain - it's still almost impossible to get decent GPUs at a decent price point after years, and there have been serious though temporary impacts on deliverability of RAM and HDDs with other shitcoins. Or with rental markets where entire city quarters are either taken over by AirBnB-style operations (because ultra-short-term "hotel" rental yields sometimes up to 4x a month what regular renting would allow) or left idle as "speculative" assets (e.g. Londongrad).
To make it worse, when scalpers buy up the remains of the available inventory, that inventory gets locked away from being used productively by anyone as scalpers have an incentive to keep their inventory off the market to drive up the price even more!
In times of resource scarcity - no matter if food or anything else that's critical for society - a good government steps in and limits the free market (e.g. by banning cryptocurrencies or scalpers, by introducing quotas or by introducing vacancy taxes) so that at least some movement of goods happens.
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.
You still need to automate account creation and setting up of a TOTP token, that’s not “easy” for a lot of people.
These trivial mitigations at least filter out low-effort script kiddies. People gaming the system “for real” will put incredible effort into getting around your countermeasures. You always have to be one step ahead of them.
With a problem like this eliminating 80% of attackers gives you 80% of the benefit, it's not an all or nothing thing.
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.
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....
Thus, even with google having my name linked to a number, it does not link to my cell phone.
Reply to comment below:
No one gets my real mobile number, so that is solved.
Why would I care if my VOIP number is in address books. That's the point of it, and why I have it
I'm not trying to hide from the government, I am preventing Google, FB, etc from linking my mobile to me, and preventing random people from tracking my location, which is trivial when they know your mobile number.
Specifically, from the point of view of network analysis, a missing or unknown node becomes suspect when various connections point to it. In the era of high connectedness, that seems like kicking a goal on your own team if you're playing the "be anonymous" game.
Just to find out that phone #5 is Pete.
Whilst it could be done, things aren't quite that far along yet. Further, I believe you are presuming I intend to remain unknown from all parties.
I believe you, and a few other commenters here are jumping to an extreme interpretation. My goal is to cut automated tracking.
A key example may be photo radar, and those license plate covers which make plates illegible (presumably). In this case, should a police officer, or the government in general want to track you, yup, they could.
For example they could go through video looking for you again. Your exact car. Including, the covered plate! It really wouldn't be that hard to do, but it would take time. Effort.
However, plate readers are networked, and databases are being kept of car movements. Having that plate cover breaks this automatic tracking, even if a dedicated person may want to track.
So you raise the bar. You remove automation.
And that's the guts of it. Because profitability in this business is won by doing a few simple things, and then collecting massive amounts of data. Remove any degree of automation, and it is no longer profitable to track someone.
I bought my phone with cash, my sim card, my minutes with cash, used a fake address and name, signed up to Google with a different fake name, bought a play card with cash, which was basically zero effort for me.
I do this whenever I buy a new phone. A new, clean slate.
I then, using my already existing infrastructure, only allow people to reach my mobile via a voip number. Done.
Yet everyone here thinks this is loads of work, with zero benefit. Welp, I disagree.
My goal is not to ensure no one is capable of tracking me ; that's literally impossible. However, I do not want:
* Google to get my name, contact info, etc via my phone itself
* Google to link to me, by seeing my mobile phone in another person's contacts
This is why I give no one my mobile number.
If the Government, or if someone was suing me, or I was up to "no good", an exhaustive search would likely bear fruit. So? That's an entirely different animal.
I'm pointing out that it takes only one of your friends or acquaintances to add your real mobile number to their address book alongside your VoIP number to ruin your system. People don't think twice about giving apps access to their address book. They're also regularly scooped up by malware.
Your scheme requires you to have perfect OpSec 100% of the time. Just human nature says you've probably goofed and given out your mobile number once or twice. There are enough huge database leaks that your info has probably been leaked by someone you don't even know.
I said I don't give my mobile number out. Do you believe my friends work diligently to find this number out? And how would they get it? And why do you believe they would get it so easily.
I don't even know my number without looking in 'about phone'.
Your scheme requires you to have perfect OpSec 100% of the time. Just human nature says you've probably goofed and given out your mobile number once or twice.
I don't understand why you think I would do that? Or how it would happen by accident.
When someone asks my number, why would I give a number I never do, instead of the number I always do. Why would I even memorize my real number? I really don't understand why you think this is hard, tricky.
Or think it is a "scheme".
I use cash almost everywhere too. I have a friend who thinks this is strange, and sketchy. Cash. Sketchy. I just get bewildered when I encounter these types of thought processes...
You withholding your caller ID only hides it from the receiving handset, it doesn't disguise it from the network.
So if you’re in the USA and you have ever called your bank’s toll-free from your mobile they already have your cell phone number. you can try to sell yourself by googling for toll-free ANACs which will read your number back to you
So they have one IMEI, they have all for that phone.
I really dont know how they think they can use 2FA to stop all but the most basic of bots from buying up rpi's.
Thats quite a lot of surveillance.
You DO realize you're posting on an article about restrictions for purchasing Pis right?
OATH/TOTP does not need your mobile number. It only needs the current time, a secret, and an SHA/HMAC function.
There's no phone number involved.
I also don't know what a verified account is. If it's just email-confirmed then yeah, that is trivial. If it is a payment card that worked, or even further a shipping address that worked, that can be more annoying to game.
I had thought that it was only the Pi Zero series that had strict quantity limits, and that people were supposed to be able to buy lots of 4's if they wanted to.
Also, for most users (not all) there isn't really a pressing need for a 4, since the 400 has been plentiful and is basically a 4 in a different form factor, with an attached keyboard. I figured if I wanted a 4 before they became available again, I'd just get a 400. What I really want is some more Zeros and Zero W's, but I think those are both being replaced by the more power hungry and expensive Zero W2.
Where in the world do they plan to hire people for these rates?
In India, the country with lowest the Big Mac Index as in [1], it would take 6.48h for the human-bot to pay for a Big Mac. And this excludes energy and internet bills and money transfer fees. The numbers just don't work.
I post the above in hopes that you realize captca isn't useful for anything and stop annoying me with them.
I was under the impression these invisible "captcha" were much more difficult since a bunch of metadata just gets scooped off the device and sent in to some proprietary Google algorithm. I'd think it'd be hard for the service to generate enough unique fingerprints to prevent Google from detecting it's the same service solving them but maybe recaptcha just sucks
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.
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.
Thankfully necessities like TP and masks are no longer being scalped but it's still happening in electronics.
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.
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.
Are the bots operated to manipulate the market, by buying up the whole supply to then sell at a higher price?
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.
In this case it is a vendor deciding not to sell to a customer who is acting in a way they perceive to be bad faith. This is their right as a vendor.
In this case it happens that the bad faith is at comfortably odds with the objectives of the vendor and product manufacturer.
As high incomes diverge even further from low (and even median) incomes, we're doing to see this happen a lot more.
And I think until this chip shortage is over in particular, we will see a lot more measures like this.
I fully applaud this -- I love my Pi 4 and I want more people to experience what these little things can do, without paying over the odds to cynical manipulative stains.
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.
Tends to make a lot of money for a few people until the market inevitably crashes which often puts many of the suppliers out of business.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/business/global/25chocola...
Anti-scalping measures are going to be necessary more and more often as the super-rich diverge from the merely rich and the rich diverge from the poor etc.
Scalpers are going to slit their own throats by price gouging Pis. Demand for Pis will dry up if the price stays at $100.
There's no such thing as a "correct price". There is a "highest price" that enough people will still pay such that all inventory is sold, but that's not the same thing as being "correct". It depends on what the seller is optimizing for.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation wants their hardware to be sold at particular price points, and they've worked hard to keep costs down so it can be sold at those price points. They've chosen to forego extra profit, with the goal of getting this hardware into as many hands as possible, especially the hands of people who want to learn and may not be able to afford a higher price.
Sure, this isn't consistent with our profit-at-all-costs capitalist culture, but that doesn't make it wrong. And retailers are free to do their best to ensure that these products get into the hands of actual end-users, rather than parasitic, speculative, profiteering scalpers who provide no added value.
In the case of Adafruit, they would much rather have a bunch of satisfied end customers who are able to buy their products and get use out of them, than a bunch of satisfied scalpers. That's their choice (and frankly, I think much better for their business), and it's their right to impose technical measures to try to deny bots from their platform. (They may not always succeed, but that's another matter.)
> 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.
Just like Adafruit is trying to do with bots, that gas station would be well within its rights to refuse to serve tanker trucks or pickup trucks full of gas cans, if their goal in slashing prices was to sell gasoline cheaply to end customers.
Don't these "bots" all have unique payment details?
If something is merely priced incorrectly, then someone else can also produce that same good and charge more for it. As a reminder, snatching up everything through automation is not "producing a good", it's market interference.
Or is it the 110th?
(The 140th and 144th also seem relevant here.)
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.
Companies do not account for this as "good will".
Accounting "goodwill" is the price an acquiring company pays above the accounting value of the business being bought, which is a notional number usually (much) lower than the economic value of a successful business.
Interestingly (at least to a weird human like me), there is something of a relationship between accounting goodwill and goodwill like the value of a brand. The reason why goodwill only shows up on a balance sheet after an acquisition is, I imagine, to follow the accounting principal of conservatism.
Let's spice things up with a hypothetical. I'm going to make up some numbers here so don't go around telling people I revealed some privileged information on HN.
Say you're Mr. McIlhenny, the() owner of a major private company called the McIlhenny Company. The McIlhenny Company's primary endeavor is selling a beloved hot sauce called Tabasco. On the income statement side, McIlhenny has revenues of $200 million and profits of $30 million. On the balance sheet, Tabasco has no liabilities (no long term debt, no payables, etc) and its only asset is cash, of which it has $1 million. Since (equity) = (assets) - (liabilities), this company has a "book value" of $1 million. You might notice that the book value seems absurd - a company that makes tens of millions of dollars a year and has a product with a major following would be a total steal of a purchase at $1 million!
A few purchasers attempt to woo you, and they each make offers for about $100 million. You go with Carl Icahn's offer. Now, the company's book value is $100 million (the balance sheet has $1 million in cash and $99 million in goodwill on it).
Clearly, the day before the acquisition, the company had roughly $99 million in "real" or "intrinsic" goodwill, but that didn't show up in the balance sheet. Why's that? One reason is conservatism. For many intangible assets, there's an art to choosing a number. If you let CEOs put in a goodwill number, many would probably throw in huge numbers as they vastly hype up the value of their brand and reputation. So, instead, we have a market approach to calculating goodwill by using transactions.
However, accounting principals allow companies downwards. So the CEO of Nikola isn't allowed to turn his bogus claims into dollars on the goodwill line item, but he is allowed to reduce goodwill if he buys a battery manufacturer that turns out to be a fraud too.
() It's owned by the McIlhenny family, but no need to complicate things
It is possible that bots are creating artificial scarcity, but that would require either one bot to corner the market or collusion among enough bots to control prices. It seems equally plausible to me that RPIs would be scarce regardless.
I think a CAPTCHA in the ordering process would make more sense.
But always better to blame scalpers. They can’t defend themselves if they don’t even exist.
Anecdotal, but IMO lots... just depends on the industry.
It's a good situation for someone to come along and buy up some or all of your risk - especially for stuff like ticket sales. Many corporations like Ticketmaster design around this, and bake this part of the supply chain into their pricing/experience.
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.
I mean there's whole services like 2captcha that give you a 24/7 on-demand API for this, and for some of their offerings/solvers there are specifically real human robots on the other end doing the CAPTCHA.
2captcha works very very well to the point that CAPTCHA is a very much solved problem especially for the popular services like Google's reCAPTCHA.
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.
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.
if it's a lottery, then some of those people would be able to buy it at $30
if it's a bidding war, then none of them would be able to buy it at $30
I developed a pi-based system for a well-known company that now has a few hundred deployed at various sites. I can assure you that they wouldn't blink at $200 each. There are businesses out there redesigning their products because they can't find any at all.
I cannot name a single person who has bought a RPi that isn't either a generously-compensated STEM worker or a member of their immediate family.
I also cannot name a single person who has bought an RPi that doesn't already own a mid-to-high-end desktop or laptop.
Poor people buy used smartphones or refurbed ex-office PCs.
EDIT: This probably explains why there's a strong scalper's market for this, thinking about it. Raspberry Pi's typical customers are wealthy enough to not care about paying an extra few bucks.
Teachers and students. The Pi has tons of uses in education
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.
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.
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.
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.
Authy works fine too (there is a good authenticator app that is actually called 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.
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.
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?
>:)
I just sold 2 used RPi that I bought ~10 years ago for more then what I paid for them brand new...
What is the current situation that requires anyone to use a bot to buy a Pi? Why is a Pi so important today?
What’s stopping someone from setting up a verified account and automating a 2FA order process? Unless there is an additional purchase limit?
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.
If you have limited runs that you want to sell fairly and maximize profit on, why not just do a regular auction?
Edit: The market is for the NFTs, not for the shoes themselves. It isn't clear to me how Adidas is able to separate demand for the shoes themselves from speculative interest in making money off of the NFT. Markets can indeed be great price discovery mechanisms, but rampant speculation can significantly tarnish the effectiveness of that mechanism because the pricing can become more dependent of the market's understanding of demand rather than on the demand itself.
The real question is why assume that was a goal?
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, the ability to sell an additional product and financial exposure to the volume in the secondary market anyway.
I didn't assume that. I was disputing as assertion that "price discovery" was the goal and that somehow made this not "gatekeeping".
Glad to see mechanisms for the primary seller to accrue value from the secondary market.
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.
I didn't say Adidas did this because of a problem, they did this for fun. The problem is also distorted due to it.
In the context of Adafruit's issue, the same model would have a result a bit more different than a one-time-password implementation.
> I didn't say Adidas did this because of a problem, they did this for fun.
This, I absolutely agree with.
> In the context of Adafruit's issue, the same model would have a result a bit more different than a one-time-password implementation.
Adafruit is trying to keep access affordable, so the Adidas model isn't appropriate to their goals.
and they noticed it too apparently
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.
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.
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.