Appraisals, value, the "Market" was Re: And $500 gets you...

I think it's like confusing Silicon Valley (or Portland, Oregon) with the world :-). Maybe if I lived and worked where you do, I would see hundreds of different venues doing a brisk business in this stuff. As it is, I see one local scrap guy (there are other local scrap guys, but they tend to specialize in stuff I'm not interested in). I also see eBay, the commercial dealers on the Internet, and private deals with people I know from the list. And that's pretty much it. So, then we'd have to ask if the market in places like Silicon Valley so dwarfs the rest of the planet that *they* should be declared "the market". I think the term "the market" should refer to wherever the bulk of the available stuff trades, (provided that the venues included are actually open to the general public). "Market value" should refer to something like the median value in the distribution of the publicly available trades. (Though that is a simplification that ignores the reasons there are different venues with different prices in the first place.)