>>724015230
>>724015816
>billions of dollars worth
i fear you don't understand how this works
There is not billions of dollars worth of value in the cs2 "knife market", there never was. the original idea of knife value came from people who are too lazy to spend an indeterminate amount of money on cases to get a skin they want, so instead they find someone on the steam marketplace selling it in good condition and buy that, saving them time and effort. Before yesterday, those were the only ways to obtain a knife skin.
Since they were so rare, and lazy people kept buying them for lump sums, there was a false idea of 'value' attached to them. and where there is value, products, and little oversight, investors will creep in and try thier hardest to exploit it for capital
Soon enough, "investors" began buying the knives. Not because they wanted to have them, but because they believed they could sell it to someone else for a profit. the different kinds of knives and the whims of the people who bought them created market turbulence, making people believe there really was a market.
The truth is, however, the majority of investors were selling to other investors. prices ballooned as everyone refused to accept losses and demanded the prices go higher. Eventually, the sum total of all combined knife value was 8 billion dollars.
how did we get that number? it's simple! take all the listings of knives for sale... and add them up! Doesn't matter what that knife used to be worth, doesn't matter how much money has actually changed hands, the mass of investors just made up reasons for prices to be higher, and pretend like thier digital toys are worth money
But now, there's a new way to get knives. It's a lot less tedious and time-consuming, and more importantly, it's leagues cheaper than turning to the giant investment bubble. And this is how the 'market' lost its '2 billion dollars'. Because the 'investors' now have to sell thier 'product' for a reasonable sum.
