What is value? How is it determined? What gives something value over the internet
Value, according to the English Dictionary:
Noun
- the regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something. "your support is of great value"
- a person's principles or standards of behavior; one's judgment of what is important in life. "they internalize their parents' rules and values" "society's values are passed on to us as children"
What I am about to tell you could possibly be illegal, I know that the selling of accounts on certain platforms breaks EULA or terms of service.
The truth is, value is determined by people not by price. It is a made up concept that can date back to thousands of years ago. Believe it or not, supply and demand determines value. An example of this can be, I have a bracelet, that I view to be very valuable. The reinforcing fact that leads me to believe it has value is because it has diamonds on it, which are considered to be very scarce.
You're probably wondering how does money flow through the internet? Well despite the fact we live in a informational technological age. Concepts that have been around since early 2000's such as Paypal, Ebay, and Skrill have been helping money flow virtually. As of 2018, we now have concepts and apps such as Crypto, Venmo, Cashapp, Stripe, and Square. All of these concepts have helped boosted internet trading market demand through the roof. It's amazing how far the internet has gotten us. Enough of this, let's get into my story.
It all started when I grew a liking to selling things. I sold candy at my high school (2015) and racked in a good $60 a day while learning in classes. The connection came from my family's cornerstore, which they grew close to the whole sellers around the area. I was getting these bars 1/4th price of retail. Good money to me, since I was only 15. This only lasted for about a year until the school principal caught me and confiscated my work. I had to move my hustle somewhere else. I usually saved up money to buy shoes, Air Jordan's mainly, but that's for another story.
At the time, I played lots of Minecraft with friends. I was on a popular server called Hypixel, where you could invite players into your party. I built a reputation on that server for being a quite decent player. This means I was good at combat and mini-games. One particular day, I was in a party with a friend of mine who invited someone with the username "Super" and "1y" to the party. I saw these usernames and thought, "god damn". That's badass. I was completely struck in awe that a username could be so clean. How does someone get a username like this? Most likely they’ve gotten it when the game first came out. Hence the name “OG” (Original)
Why does a username like this have value? People like the cleanness and owning it represents a high social level or high status. It's attention grabbing. That's the truth.
After a few minutes of convo, he told me to go to the Main Minecraft Trading Site which I will not disclose. This was a third party site meaning it wasn't owned by Mojang. It was legit the wild west. Scams were so common. I setup my own paypal, and paid my pops cash to get money into my paypal account. I copped my first OG, "Pimp" for around $60 in early 2016. Expensive at the time. This was my first act towards an actual business in this game. About a month later, I found someone on the market who would be willing to trade the username "Cash" for "Pimp". We conducted the trade however a few weeks later, I lost possession to the account and found out I've been scammed. He pulled the account. This was my first encounter with a internet scammer.
How did he do this? Well when you change the email on an account, an email gets sent to your previous email just in case a "hacker" steals your Minecraft account and changes the email on your account. In that email is a "dispute link" which expires in 30 days but can be usable anytime. When this link is clicked, you pretty much get your account back. He did that, I felt like shit.
February 2016, My friend "Super" ended up giving me the account "Cobra" which was insane at the time. Worth about $150. Everyday, after school, I played for around 6-7 hours. I built a good name for myself on the marketplace by interacting with other people and playing with them on Hypixel. I created a guild named Royalty Gang, this was the first ever guild/team that consisted of OG Minecraft names. We later on changed our name to OG nation and our guild grew to around 100+ members. This way of networking became amazing but toxic. We had a skype group which pretty much consisted of it's own marketplace. I gave Cobra back to Super and he got the new name "Love". Ended up buying Harm off of him which was worth $200 at the time. I also ended up buying Hawkeye and Wart for $100 from the owner of Hulk who later exit scammed the marketplace for $300. June 2016, about a few months in, I still had lots of money saved up but I decided to take my game up. There was word that a real OG player who had auto-claimed over 1000 OG names when Minecraft first came out was trying to get rid of his accounts. He owned over 50% of the market supply. He went by the name of WaterSpice. I got Sharp, Honor, Heal, gz, Omega, Fable, Steak, and Sneak off of him for a bulk price of around $1200. This was a huge transaction for a 15 year old like myself. But I had the capital saved up from selling “Harm” for $350 ($150 profit), candy at school (around $50 a day), and Hawkeye and Wart ($200). I placed all of these accounts, except Sharp, on the marketplace immediately and started to get offers. I made a profit of around $450-500. I continued to play daily and build a name for myself. November 2016, I later sold Sharp for $450 profit to a marketplace user when the value of MC accounts risen.
My $1,900 MC account: Before I get into this, I got to explain the value of minecraft capes. Capes are usually only obtained by going to a special Minecon event or given out by Minecraft Developers themselves. That being, out of all the 20 million minecraft accounts, this was one of the 20 accounts. The Cobalt cape. This cape was only given to the winners of a tournament of another game that Mojang created called Cobalt. The guy who won the tournament didn’t even play Minecraft much. I got in contact with him around December 2018 and bought his account for $200. Which was a complete steal. I later sold the account for $550 in Jan 2017. By this time, I quit playing. I didn’t come back until mid August 2018 when I found out the Cobalt cape account I sold apparently got locked and value of MC accounts were 3 times from what they were before. I came back, got the Cobalt cape account back for free since I knew info on it that others did not. 3 days after I got the account I sold it for $1,500 in Bitcoin.
Why did I include so many particular events in my story? Because these key events shaped me into who I am now and how I do my business. I feel as if it's important that really take into account these events and try to get the best meaning out of them.
All in all, I probably made a 2-3 thousand dollars from just being in this game. So many young people, like myself, nowadays are doing not only internet making money techniques but learning networking techniques using the internet like CS:GO skin trading, Fortnite Account selling (Which I will share about my experience on this later) , Clash of Clans account, and the most notorious Social Media OG's. This is only the story of myself, there are so many others who I bet have had a larger run than me. Young people are teaching themselves newer ways to make money and i'm all for it. Let's keep this money flowing! However, hope ya enjoyed! Ask any questions, I will be glad to answer.
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