the "scalper problem" is strikingly similar to many cryptographic problems - the "sybil problem" in token distribution ("distribute 25 bitcoin every 10 minutes to a random participant") is obviously similar to distributing scarce items which are scalpable (sold below market clearance price).

"We'll just have a free-for-all (random distribution)"? Oh ok I'll register 2 million network participants (or IPs, or email addresses, or browser sessions, or privacy CC numbers, etc). Without some kind of outside oracle proving user uniqueness (and many many oracles that people think of, like CC number or billing address, are not actually unique!) it is extremely extremely difficult to construct this system.

NVIDIA distributing some 4090s via GeForce Experience is another interesting example of a hardware oracle, the telemetry is a fairly strong signal of hardware authenticity (as proven by Overwatch's fairly effective hardware bans).

I once met a guy who had a stack of 50 sim cards used for bot buying sneakers and playstations. Guy didn't work in tech but had learned javascript and selenium for scalping. You can also ship a lot of things to the same address by just altering it slightly like setting the unit/number to 1B or something when there is no 1B, the delivery people will get it to the right place but the unique check will think it's a different address.

He had apparently made enough money doing this to pull himself out of poverty and get a decent life going.