This is kind of an unorthodox suggestion but bear with me.

This is the last dirty normal weapon I need for my collection, and it's also been the hugest pain in the ass to find. According to stats, something like 2400 of these exist but I have not seen them. I've had an ad up on bazaar.tf, tf2op, tf2tp, and reddit and nothing. I even have a message paying people for information, and the people that responded to that have not found any either. I've only even ever seen 3 of them, and they were in the backpacks of some other dirty collectors.

What I'm seeing here is that whatever level demand is at, supply is nonexistant. I've been doing searches for the dirty on outpost and bazaar every chance I get for days and no hits ever. I would attribute this to them being massively overpriced in the store, so I dont think any have been purchased since they were new and still selling for way too much.

This leads me to say that the price of these is higher than other normal dirties. Say what you want about it just being a normal dirty weapon; these are much rarer than the average dirty weapon and are very hard to find, so they have value to collectors. See uncraft vita-saw, sun on a stick and sharpened volcano fragment to see what I mean.

I'm setting the value to a rec because that's what I've been offering for days now. In reality the equilibrium price might be higher, but without any actual trades to judge from, the only data point I have is my value for demand. I've seen some others looking too but they were all offering less than a rec.

my suggestion here is also in the hopes that if people know they are rare, we will see more people looking for them to sell on the market.

http://www.tf2outpost.com/trade/5449490

http://www.tf2outpost.com/trade/4919622

http://www.tf2outpost.com/trade/3906579

http://www.tf2outpost.com/trade/3359612

I'm certainly not the only one looking for these

(this was in reply to a removed comment)

when supply is 0, demand can't be lower than supply.

In the interests of full disclosure, I found someone selling one for a scrap, though he has not sold to me yet. this is the first one I've seen for sale since I started looking and I think it's just a case of him not knowing he has something that's fairly rare.

I still think my reasoning is sound. I think the fact that these sell like other uncrafts is that nobody that has one to sell knows how rare they are. At the normal market value there is literally nobody selling these a vast majority of the time and that should be a huge indicator that the equilibrium price is not where supply and demand meet.

the difference is that these don't drop. red apples to green apples, not exactly different but they aren't the same either

I'm not going to rewrite everything I already wrote, but the fact that this happens is because nobody except people that have really been looking for them know how few of them there are. in a situation that supply and demand are at equilibrium, you will find items sold and unsold in the market. that is not the case here, the market is completely empty of these except in the rare case that someone happens to have one and doesn't know it's rare. When they do appear they are bought up quickly, because the price they sell for is below the intersection of supply and demand.