Yes. We've seen chipmaker MSRPs inflated, especially in the most recent releases like the 6600XT. Chipmakers are constrained by contractual obligations and PR though. AIBs have also inflated their MSRPs for cards. They seem to have contractual agreements with the chipmakers to sell some portion of their cards at Chipmaker MSRP, at least around the launch. However, to their best ability they are putting their die allocation into their highest end card variants that have the highest MSRPs. Then distributors, retailers, and PC builders mark up the cards over the AIB MSRP. Again, these are often limited to some extent by agreements with their suppliers. If all of these markups don't reach the market rate the cards are bought up by scalpers with bots and sold at the true market rate on eBay.
Nvidia already added in a hardware crypto mining block to it's latest models and they are still having massive supply issues. It's not about crypto even though everyone likes to make a big deal out of it to feel better.
The latter does not follow from the former (even if it might be true). The mining block only affects the latest batches of a few models, but profitability of mining also affects demand for the other models, for AMD GPUs, and in the second-hand market. Unless the supply of mining-blocked GPUs is sufficient to cover all displaced demand from these other segments, it doesn't necessarily help much.
They don't block all mining, just specific algorithms. It's easy enough to mine some other coin and convert to the one you want. In fact, that's often more profitable.
