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> Prior to the most recent update, some Knives, like a Doppler Ruby Butterfly Knife, could fetch around $20,000 on third-party storefronts like CSFloat.

How many whales are buying an in-game cosmetic for $20K for their own use?

How much of this is day-trading? How much is investing? How much is fabricated by trading platforms? How much is money laundering? How much is a criminal payments channel?

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I thought the same. Surely the number of people buying a 20k knife so it looks good when they play must be extremely low. The bulk have to be speculators.

This is true and it is also why a large portion of the playerbase likes this change. It makes many of these knives much more affordable for people that actually play the game.

The number is probably nonzero but those are the whales, the kids of the super rich who have millions to blow on trivial shit. The rest will be in it for trading, for the potential that either another trader will buy their stuff for more (in the hopes that it will appreciate more) or one of those whales will.

But it's probably mostly money laundering, I wouldn't be surprised if the crypto market is tightly integrated in it too. Buy using crypto, sell using fiat, ???, cash.

I think the majority is money laundering.

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