Its three key characteristics are: a small number of buyers and sellers; high risks to both; and widespread concern about the market's legitimacy.
Just stand in the hotel's fourth-floor lobby, and the buyers and sellers, high and low, will eventually swirl past.
"If you have a chair that has sold for $40,000, it's hard to put it up for auction at $10,000 to $15,000," Wright said, adding that sellers' high expectations led to the increased number of passed lots this week.
Some users were pissed off that they'd lost all the Bitcoin wealth they'd amassed, or that paid-for orders would go undelivered, while small-time dealers freaked out about how they suddenly lacked the funds to pay off debts owed to drug sellers higher up the food chain.
One is a supposedly shameful admission of cultural ignorance that will make Games Workshop employees very angry with me, and the other is a political confession that will have Morning Star sellers high-fiving me across the oil drum fires at fire station picket lines.
The top seller, a high school English teacher in California, has made $36,000 in sales.
If you run across a seller offering high discounts on natural emeralds, you may want to second guess their credibility.
Still, he said, sellers want high prices for their homes, even if that isn't realistic.
EBay's "Best Match" search results, for instance, give higher placement to listings offering free shipping and sellers with high feedback ratings.
By contrast, sellers with high reputations seemed to get slightly higher bids when they added surcharges, although the increase was too small to be statistically significant.
