Information Valuation - The Most Buck for the Bits?

Rational asks: "I've heard of Everquest accounts sold for upwards of a thousand dollars... Considering that what is actually for sale is just an username and password, which generally comes up to less than 20 bytes in total, this amounts to over $50 per byte. What are the most expensive pieces of information that you have heard of, in dollars per byte? Perhaps satellite pictures? The Human genome?"

License Keys

[GigsVT]

It would have to be license keys. Probably involving SGI.

A license key is a string of maybe 30 bytes usually, and cost up to the millions of dollars.

Human genome project doesn't come close

[sam_handelman]

Let's save time and say that the human genome is a round 750 MB (it's about 3 gigabases, each base is two bits, so it's 750 MB.)

It cost about US $300 million. The project cost of 3 bil, bandied about, is the amount we expect to spend in the period from about 1990 to 2005 (reference, search page for "billion" [mit.edu]) on projects related to Genomics, which is the study of biological sequences, not just the human genome but a wealth of other information (including information about protein structures and the like - I generated four gigs of analytical information just this afternoon.)

Regardless, if you say that the fruit of the $300 million spent directly on the human genome is ONLY the human genome, and not all of the other data (such as correlations with other genomes which is what I was evaluating today, or the information about the number of genes, etc.) it still works out to about $US 0.40 a byte (300 bil over 750 MB). Dear, but not even in the running for most expensive data ever.

A pricing problem - do you pay for the source code, or the binary? If you're paying for the source code, I'm sure somebody, sometime, charged a full years salary to develop a Perl program 70 or 80 ASCII characters long. It could run hundreds of dollars a byte, easy.

Re:Credit Card Numbers

[macdaddy357]

Regular Amex is a charge card. You must pay the balance in full each month. There is no interest, but you pay a fat annual fee for the privelage. With a credit card, you pay over time, plus interest. With a debit card, money is taken out of an existing account, such as checking.

Re:Data

[kubrick]

The Folks In Charge, in this case, are the government. If they want it, they'll take it. A principle known as 'eminent domain'.