True....but a job has all the messiness of actual scarcity of both time and physical resources. Buying up all the cucumber emojis to manipulate markets has none of those things. As Spiffing Brit taught us all a couple years ago:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u372HKrw5eA
. . . and NFTs have scarcity of virtual resources that nobody actually needs.
Real world market manipulation typically works because there is real demand for things like food, water, orange juice, barrels of oil, steel, or other commodities.
You don't even have to control 100% of supply, you just have to make it so that supply is a few percent less than demand, and then prices spike, because people and companies really need those things, so if the market price goes up and they can't get it somewhere else cheaper, they will pay a premium because they have to.
Since nobody needs a virtual cucumber emote, it's pretty hard to manipulate that market. It seems the guy in that video got someone to buy a £10 cucumber, probably a bot, I guess by convincing the bot the price was on the rise, but overall he just lost money on that trade. He tries to convince the viewer he made money on that cucumber, by taking the average purchase price, but the average doesn't matter - he experienced a net loss, because he had far more cucumbers he bought than sold, even at a large markup on that single item, and with Valve taking a cut, that cuts into his margins somewhat significantly.
It got me to wondering what behaviors cross the line from legal to illegal. Buying up the surplus cheap emojis probably isn't illegal behavior. But, I bet a lot of market manipulators will try things shadier, like for example creating a bunch of sock puppet accounts from which to buy from themselves at ever increasing prices, so you create a nice trend line that gets people looking at the graph, saying, "Hey, the line is going up over the course of 2 or 3 weeks on this item, this must be the new Tulip Bulbs!"
I presume creating a bunch of such sock puppet accounts to buy from yourself and re-sell back to yourself at ever higher prices is probably illegal (although, also, that incurs a lot of Valve tax, and probably government tax - sales or VAT - too).
