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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.

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?

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.

I'm not missing that fact. I think that NFTs are a bad, customer hostile solution to that problem.

Its more of a byproduct of a marketing push than an attempt at a solution.

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.

> Its more of a byproduct of a marketing push than an attempt at a solution.

> 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.

mmm yeah forgot that was one of the purposes of the Raspberri Pi, I just noticed that the 4's are too good

and they noticed it too apparently

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

An auction seems like a much simpler way to do price discovery without excluding that part of your customer base that doesn't know how to use an NFT (or doesn't want to.)

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 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.

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.

> The real question is why assume that was a goal?

I didn't assume that. I was disputing as assertion that "price discovery" was the goal and that somehow made this not "gatekeeping".

and so do I

Glad to see mechanisms for the primary seller to accrue value from the secondary market.

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?

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.

What stops automation of grabbing the initial NFT release?

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.

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