#mannconomy

TBH as much as I make fun of Mann Co. and tf2 trading it’s still a cool system that was beneficial for players and provided more data on how economies react to stimuli. Buds were basically treated like gold so now that their arbitrary value is lost it’s gonna be interesting to see how that changes the market flow. 

Buds will still have value in the same way gold still has value even though we dropped the gold standard decades ago. In fact the price of buds might continue to rise in the same way the price of gold continues to rise historically as, like gold, there is a limited quantity of buds.

For those of ya’ll who don’t know the gold standard was what we used to use to give US currency value.

(This is where I’m just speculating): I believe the reason we dropped it was because it meant we could only ever have a certain percentage of the world’s wealth, as we had a certain percentage of the world’s gold, by dropping the gold standard, it meant that we were no longer limited by the amount of gold we had. unflinching-juggernaut said: The gold standard was dropped because the Federal Reserve ran out of bullion in the 30’s.

It’s kind of interesting, because now buds are in this kind of limbo state, where they no longer have any real world or virtual world connection to give them an inherent value. It is agreed upon that buds are a very limited commodity, so there is intrinsic value there, but that wasn't what made buds so expensive. Buds were expensive because they had a direct relationship to keys, and in fact were treated as a currency leveled above keys, in the same way keys are a currency leveled above refined.

Now that buds no longer have that relationship with keys, the only thing keeping them so expensive is their limited quantity. However, since buds no longer have a direct relationship to keys, their relationship to refined is going to be constantly fluctuating, since the $ to a refined right now is around $.20. 

This means that the market (tf2 in game market) where buds should still have value, has no direct way to measure its worth. The only place where buds can be accurately valued is the steam community market, but the price of buds on the community market is still largely based on when we were still on the buds standard. 

Actually its fucking awesome for yall, youll be able to buy more and more cosmetics with one key, as the amount of refined that goes into a single key will continue to inflate, like last i checked it was 17 refined to a key, a year ago it was what, eight?

The easiest way to explain it is this, in 1970 $1 is equal to what is roughly $6 today, now imagine the beginning of tf2s economy is 1970 and todays is 2015. That means today you can get roughly $6 worth of hats with only $1, and the amount of hats per dollar you’ll be able to buy is only gonna increase.

So rejoice everybody!

If you mean you dont participate in trading at all it means literally nothing fear not.

I’ve seen this shit coming for years, actually since the community market was opened for the first time ive seen this shit coming, tf2 is free to play and as the rate at which items are being recrafted or deleted is basically irrelevant when compared to how many new items are being acquired the market would eventually become oversaturated, this happened even quicker since people could create dozens of proxy accounts to farm items, and still can even with tf2s new joke of an anti-idle system. 

Thankfully any item that can be sold on the steam marketplace still has an anchor to reality, but that doesnt always  mean the price will stay constant, just look at the buds.

(The jittering near the end is just an area that hasnt been smoothed out yet) Buds have a real world anchor and yet as inflation continues to speed up, so does the devaluation of buds, so why is this? It’s basically because big time traders are gradually cashing out one by one and transitioning over to counter strike global offensive or dota, which have far better implemented marketing systems. So basically the quantity of products available are increasing while the demand for them decreases, driving the price down. 

This trend downwards has only accelerated recently with backpack.tf stating it will no longer accept buds as a commonplace currency.

However, despite the buds special circumstances, the trend is occurring with almost all tf2 items, as the quantity available increases and demand decreases as players leave, with the exception of keys which are consumed at a similar rate to the rate that they are purchased due to their relatively low price and theoretically sustainable wealth gain. 

So what is the message for traders in tf2 right now, who may be worried in this seemingly endless economic disaster? 

But what I want to know is why are they raising the prices of keys rather than raising the price of everything else other than just keys.