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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>It's manipulation by definition. These hidden trades exist to prevent other people from being able to act in their own best interest based on available information.

So if I have a RTX 4090 to sell (a very sought after commodity these days), and I sell it to my buddy rather than listing it on ebay, I'm doing market "manipulation"?

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your graphic card isn't a stock market.

A market is a market, is it not?

no, securities aren't the same as retail products

That might be so, but the original comment wasn't talking about "securities manipulation", just "manipulation".

only if you take it entirely out of the context in which it's in, which is the comment section on an article about securities

Most things are different from each other. Why does that difference matter in this case? It looks a lot like traders trading in a market. That isn't manipulation.

A graphics card is non-fungible due to depreciation from use.

That isn't so; I looked up an RTX 4090 on Ebay [0]. The only information I see related to depreciation is "Used: An item that has been used previously" and a representation from the seller that they weren't using it for crypto, suggesting that the seller (and the buyer; this looks like a standard graphics card listing to me) are treating used graphics cards as fungible.

[0] https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/306189964097

The graphics card would repesent a stock. Both are a good.

Depends on the volume

Fine, is OpenAI doing "manipulation" when they buy 10k H100s from nvidia directly, rather than on the open market?

If it causes "no liquidity" in the open market because nvidia (tsmc) can only produce so many GPUs / month and that causes nvidia's other cards to have a street price of 2x MSRP due to lack of availability? I would say yes.. It's just that "H100" or "RTX 5090" is not a registered stock with the SEC, so there aren't specific laws / penalties for manipulating the GPU market.

Same as "10 per store" limits when PS5s or whatever are in short supply, but then the CEO calls up the warehouse to get one for every student in their kid's class.

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