I'm not offended at all and I understand how a BIN and starting bid works. Your hypothetical just has nothing to do with sniping or proving it works or not. It also isn't the scenario the OP is talking about. All it shows is that if you gamble on a BIN by waiting till the last minute, you can get it for the starting bid. If nobody else is interested, you can accomplish the same thing by bidding immediately at the $20 level. If you wait, you run the risk of losing to somebody who hits the BIN and you have no chance to then snipe or do anything else. If to you the item is not worth the BIN or not something you really care about, I suppose that's a good way to operate. If, however, it is worth the BIN, you are taking a gamble and may very well end up not winning. Similarly, if you wait until the last minute to bid on a regular auction, you risk a side deal or a seller just cancelling the auction. Admittedly, you run those same risks even if you do bid, but I think it's probably less likely once an auction has a bid that such side dealing will occur.
The only two things that sniping accomplishes is possibly deterring shill bidding by the seller on auctions that don't have any other bids but yours and preventing other bidders from tracking your interest in auctions where there is a hidden gem that others haven't noticed. This seems to be a bigger problem lately as at least on Sealed Game Heaven, people are posting buyer's Ebay IDs and forcing buyers to wait until the last minute to bid so that others won't discover their hidden gems.
You can call it whatever you want, but you're running a small business which you then take the profits from to buy games for your personal collection. Justify it however you want, but that's how most small businesses run. The owners take the profits and buy what they want with them.
Originally Posted by jonebone
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