Comment by eric_h | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eric_h | Hacker News Reader

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I really wanted a PS5 when it was first released, and I refused to pay the scalper tax to get one, so I spent a few minutes a few times a day over a couple of weeks trying to snag one from one of the many retailers selling them. Extraordinarily frustrating, I was not so interested in this process that I was going to script it or any such nonsense, I just wanted to eventually get lucky and snag one.

I eventually did, and when it finally arrived at my doorman building I mentioned what was in the package to the doorman, and how happy I was to finally get my hands on it after the effort expended and he said "oh really? there's a guy on the 5th floor who's bought dozens of them - he sold me one at cost".

At the scale of the PS5 release (I don't know how many they first shipped in 2020, but they're at >80M sold now so undoubtedly X million in the first year) - would an address match intervention have been able to differentiate my order from the dozens of orders the scalper on the 5th floor had placed, presuming some cooperation from the doorman to allow for variance in the details of the shipping address the scalper used? I'm reasonably confident the answer is no and I would have been caught in the net that attempted to prevent the scalper from scalping.

At least I don't think scalper's will be a problem with the Steam Machine and I honestly believe someone with the knowledge of building PCs can build something way more powerful.

Even with today's RAM prices?

Yeah, good point.

Linus Tech Tips built a computer with around twice the performance at the same price with current RAM prices. You lose out on size and SteamOS features like quick resume & CEC.

Surely you have an apartment number? Or is it like in many places in Europe, where the address is the building number and name of the recipient?

I have since moved out of NYC but yes I had an apartment number. If the doorman was helping this scalper, the scalper could have varied the address he used enough to avoid exact match dedupes while still ensuring he could claim the packages as his from the doorman.

You slip the doorman $50 to hold tracking numbers of packages you're having sent to random units in the building. Or just promise him a unit at MSRP for his help.

These sorts of things are pretty cheaply routed around for those making scalping into a volume business.

Sure you can probably lock things down so you catch the vast majority of these mechanisms, but not without impacting legitimate users. So it's a tradeoff of how much more of a hassle do you want to make things for legitimate customers vs. how much you want to lock out resellers.

You don't even really need a doorman in many buildings either. There will be a shared mail room (if you're lucky) where packages get dropped. If you work from home you just watch the UPS/Fedex tracking and run down the moment it gets delivered to snag it before anyone else sees it.

The few folks I know who did this sort of thing were less professionals making a living off it, and more someone who wanted to subsidize their gaming habit by grabbing 3 or 4 units and keeping one while flipping the rest. They'd just ship to friends/family. The folks buying 50 units at a time are pretty rare from what I can tell.

This doesn't seem like a reason not to do address based limiting, just a reason it wouldn't be perfect.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

If you live in a house you can generate tens of thousands of addresses that will be delivered to you without much problem.

You just begin inventing apt. numbers - having up to a thousand apts in a building is not suspicious. And once you cross a thousand, you can invent new buildings by strapping letter names to your home number, so that gives you a-z * 1000 = 24000 unique addresses you can generate easily. Without much hassle you could extend that to a million.

Requiring a unique mailing address is just as pointless as a unique email.

But we have databases of addresses and we can tell if it actually has 1000 apartments.

Who's updating those db's when I turn my single family in to a tri-plex , then convert it to an 10 unit apartment complex?

The answer is "no one".

That depends on where you live. In my country the government keeps an up-to-date db. Everything else in the country depends on and queries that db too, so it's not isolated.

Doorman? Do you live in Trump Tower?

Doorman buildings are quite common in NYC.

[edit: to be clear they are not the norm, they are more expensive than buildings without one, but there are still lots of them that are not Trump Tower or other places for the absurdly wealthy]

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