But to not believe that mining profitability over the last 18 months has no impact on GPU availability/pricing is a little disingenuous.
Please see my edit to my last post. I'm not saying that mining has NO culpability, but considering the "laws" of supply+demand, if demand spikes, that will push the price equalibrium up, given the same supply, but it doesn't (directly) affect supply. Shortages are caused by a large of supply. That's why BFG10K's statement was itself disingenuous and didn't make sense. Supply and demand are independent variables.
Edit: If he had properly said, "mining demand increases prices nearly exponentially", I might have agreed with him, but "mining demand
causes shortages" (lack of supply), does not compute.
Maybe he effectively meant, "mining's exponential demand for GPUs, causes a relative supply shortage for gamers, by taking a larger and larger percentage of mfg supply", not that how I originally read his statement and disagreed with, that "excess demand affects supply". He meant relative portion of supply available to gamers, and not actual mfg supply. Sorry.
That said, I think retailers anti-botting countermeasures (BestBuy, in-store pickup after online order), queue-system (EVGA), random lottery (Newegg Shuffle), seem to somehow be "not enough".
It's really kind of like an attempt at "gamer socialism", having a top-down command economy of sorts, to allocate and distribute GPUs to gamers, rather than to just sell them to the highest bidder (generally a miner, could be a "rich" gamer too).
LHR was kind of an attempt, mostly marketing, to deter miners from buying the LHR GPUs. But, like any DRM scheme, it was soon cracked, and now deters miners little.
Like someone noted, a reddit comment, would GPU mfg's rather sell one GPU every four years to a broke-azz gamer, or would they rather sell pallets to those guys (miners) with the $$$?
And think of how much the GPU mfg's obscene profits
due to miners and the mining craze, are going to funnel back upwards towards the GPU R&D pipeline, to make
even better GPUs for gamers. That's something that gamers rarely admit about the "miner crowd".