The last several months have made it abundantly clear that there are bad, greedy people preying on electronics consumers. They've always been there, but recently it has only gotten exponentially worse. Nvidia's release of the RTX 3000 series graphics cards was a total disaster. If you were like most people looking to score a GPU on release day, you were out of luck before you could say "Shut up and take my money!" These scum-of-the-earth people used bots to wipe out inventories in seconds, only to resell them at huge markups or use them for massive cryptocurrency mining operations.

This has created an unfair balance in the scales. MSRPs are now a thing of the past. GPUs that were supposed to sell for $499, $699, or $1,499, are being scalped online for hundreds, or even thousands, over MSRP. In a time when manufacturing components are in short supply, the last thing consumers need to battle with are bots, scalpers, and miners.

For me personally, I'm not even that much of a gamer. I'm a 3D animator and video content creator. High-performance GPUs are pretty much a requirement for my workflow. I not only need access to products like these to do my work, but I need as many as four in one machine to deliver a final product in a reasonable amount of time. With scalpers cornering the entire market, it makes it impossible for a small business owner like myself to afford to make a profit on projects my clients pay me to produce.

I'm writing this petition to request Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Microsoft, eBay, and other involved companies, make right by consumers and bring regulation to the GPU industry.

I am requesting a ban on cryptocurrency mining using GPUs less than one year from their release date. This would include software- and/or hardware-based prevention of using cryptocurrency mining programs on new GPUs. Attempting to disable these features could brick the GPU and tag the serial number as unsellable. However, GPU manufacturers can refurbish these afterward. I would even like to go as far as to request cryptocurrency mining on GPUs less than one year old be made illegal at an international level.

I am requesting a ban on the hoarding and reselling of GPUs online at severe markup within 6 months to 1 year of purchase using serial number records and verification. Online reselling sites, like eBay, would have to verify serial numbers in this database before approving listings. Sellers are ok to list up to MSRP anytime after their initial purchase. Authorized vendors would have to take some sort of measure to better verify the identity of purchasers to prevent hoarding.

I would hope that these ideals would not only retain themselves to GPUs but spread throughout the entire consumer electronics industry as a whole. If we take the opportunity out of the game, then perhaps the product would become available for real consumers to enjoy... and nobody would have to sell their kidneys.