Some kind of hardware exchange makes sense, rather than random dead end topics. Maybe Purism is not interested in catering for that at the current time though.
They could but why? What value is being added? What problem is being solved?
This problem may be harder than it looks, with former former former … owners, and transactions that happen outside of the forum, and the difficulty in uniquely identifying a phone, and the difficulty in identifying an anonymous former owner. Is this really something that Purism would want to devote resources to?
As we have seen with Apple, once a company gets involved in “verifying” things, when something slips through the cracks, the company gets blamed. So Purism should really take a cut of the proceeds in order to cover its costs. Which seller wants that?
I don’t know that that is what was being suggested.
However, for a company where true ownership by the purchaser is a selling point, it would be awkward to decide that they were going to control your eventual sale of your phone. So if that was being suggested then you are right.
This whole concept if scalping of commodities has me baffled. Is this a European artifact? Here in the US, I have only heard about scalping in the concept of concert tickets. Some music fans will pay anything to see their favorite artist perform. And the market to any one event is very limited in quantity if the band is very famous. So you get in line early, pay a fixed price for tickers, and sell them at triple the price to those who can’t get in to the concert after ticket sales stop. But I have never heard of scalping commodities like electronic devices. Why does this occur in some places and not in others?
When the Covid-19 started, a few people bought-up all of the supply of sanitizer hand lotion. E-Bay prohibited them from selling it on their forum at any price above the manufacturer’s retail price. Then the manufacturers caught up on their backlog before the scalpers could sell much of their product. That’s one way to fix scalpers. But this phenomenon is so rare that in my 58 years, I’ve only seen it happen to concert tickets and hand wipe after the start of a pandemic. In what parts of the world are markers routinely affected by scalpers?
There is no evidence that it is occurring with the Librem 5. I am not satisfied that anyone scalped via the Librem 5. It would be quite risky. People who are selling their brand new Librem 5 phone may be doing so for a reason that has nothing to do with scalping. We should not be claiming to be mind readers. However an obvious reason is that they had an anticipated need for a phone in 2017 but it took so long to get the phone that in the meantime they went out and bought another phone.
It is possible that some people have done this with new release iPhones. You see the queues (of lemmings) on TV, particularly in the heyday of the iPhone. However Apple is clearly able to manufacture in vast quantities, so any scalping would be of limited duration.
It happens with anything that is high demand, it just isn’t always referred to as scalping, which, as you point out, is a term we here in the US reserve almost exclusively for ticket sales. Scalping was pretty common though when the PS5 was released, because Sony couldn’t come anywhere near meeting initial demand.
Also, ammo scalping in the US is pretty common anytime there is a shortage (like now). In this instance, we just refer to scalpers and scalping by the terms neckbeards and neck bearding respectively.
What makes you think arbitrage should be risk-free? If you have capital locked up in an item, you always risk the market changing before you can sell it, and you always risk not being able to estimate the market correctly, due to the market being made of other people.
Would single users selling their sole librem 5 really qualify as scalpers? All the adds I saw usually list legitimate reasons for selling them. They either have no use for it anymore, or have other reasons for wanting to get rid of it. It doesn’t seem to be done with the intent of making a large profit, and most don’t want to sell them with a loss. They supported purism by buying the device in the first place, and maybe they can get something out of the current demand themselves, because so many people are waiting for theirs. Personally I don’t think there’s any bad intent.
It is just marketing. The only “real” benefit is to keep every used Stinkpad, Nokia, and any other gadget from being sold here. Puri.sm will want to keep track of serial numbers anyway may as well keep it in-house. Otherwise I agree, just let eBay and Craigslist do the job.
Oh and the random stolen item may turn up, should someone be dumb enough try to sell here. A stolen serial number would be a red flag, a honeypot.
if one was trying to profit from a price discrepancy between IBM on the NYSE and IBM on the London Stock Exchange
In principle it is risk free. The smaller the trade, the smaller the risk of not being able to execute (but the smaller the profit), as discussed in the next piece of text.
they may purchase a large number of shares on the NYSE and find that they cannot simultaneously sell on the LSE. This leaves the arbitrageur in an unhedged risk position
In principle the two trades are happening simultaneously. That’s another reason why you can’t compare buying a Librem 5 in 2017 for one price and trying to sell it three years later for a higher price.
But we digress, and it seems like the OP is a hit-and-run so maybe let’s leave it.
maybe these people already received their L5s by ordering many pieces at once in the original backer campaign. maybe they got 2 or 3 at the start and seeing as their family member wouldn’t or couldn’t use GNU/Linux phones they decided to sell them as a way to encourage other people to use them …
There is no such thing as “scalping”. There is only the free market ensuring the availability of scarce resources via price, or regulation distorting the market to create winners and losers to benefit the politically-connected few.
To take it ad absurdam: Larry Niven’s “Ringworld”, where only lottery winners could have children, so the end result was the human race was bred for “luck”.
