>I think a CAPTCHA in the ordering process would make more sense.

There was another thread here a while back where someone shared their experience writing sneaker scalping bots. Apparently, CAPTCHA tokens are valid for a minute or so, so this guy would solve heaps of them just before the form went live and cache the validation tokens.

Then, when the form went live, the real humans who didn't have cached CAPTCHA tokens would be slowed down even more.

Net result is that the botters ended up getting an even greater share of the supply than without CAPTCHAs.

> Apparently, CAPTCHA tokens are valid for a minute or so, so this guy would solve heaps of them just before the form went live and cache the validation tokens.

I mean there's whole services like 2captcha that give you a 24/7 on-demand API for this, and for some of their offerings/solvers there are specifically real human robots on the other end doing the CAPTCHA.

2captcha works very very well to the point that CAPTCHA is a very much solved problem especially for the popular services like Google's reCAPTCHA.

FWIW I missed reservations to a national park because I use Firefox and Google made me click traffic lights and buses for thirty seconds before being able to continue.

And, of course, Google thinks it always knows more about buses than I do. "Hey, YOU MISSED A BUS"

That is the most unironically fascist-dystopian thing I have read on hacker news in like 3 hours.

I wonder how much retail arbitrage is just leaks by the resellers themselves.

But always better to blame scalpers. They can’t defend themselves if they don’t even exist.

> retail arbitrage is just leaks by the resellers themselves

Anecdotal, but IMO lots... just depends on the industry.

It's a good situation for someone to come along and buy up some or all of your risk - especially for stuff like ticket sales. Many corporations like Ticketmaster design around this, and bake this part of the supply chain into their pricing/experience.