Information Valuation - The Most Buck for the Bits? 506
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?"
Credit Card Numbers (Score:3, Insightful)
Data (Score:2, Insightful)
The most value has got to be in passwords... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Data (Score:2, Insightful)
yrs,
Ephemeriis
Headlines. (Score:5, Insightful)
Calculate the cost of that.
--Blair
"Hint: don't just count $."
Glib reasoning (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, the money is being paid (presumably) for the stats and inventory of that user. So saying the 'value per byte' based on the metrics of the key is like saying that paying 1000$ for a key to a safety deposit box with 1000$ in it works out to (1000/metrics-of-key)$
So the real cost-per-byte number for these EQ accounts relates to how many bytes are in a full player record for an EQ account.
Anyhow, I'm sure some company out there has paid in the thousands for a few lines of code.
This does make me think about my 'Guiness Book of World Records That We'll Never Know' book I wish I could have. Whats the furthest a rental cars keys have ever been from its associated car, and is there an interesting story about it? You get the idea
Re:By that logic I bought an expensive key... (Score:2, Insightful)
To extend your analogy, it's like getting the house built on your land with the option to tear it down if you don't want to pay for the keys.
enigma (Score:3, Insightful)
Even more importantly - look at WWII German Enigma codes - the decoding of any one single message was certainly valuable, but understanding how to decode it was invaluable. Like life - power is knowledge, and understanding is inferring knowledge where before there was none (read: understanding creates power).
cheers
Re:Data (Score:3, Insightful)
No, you don't get the character file. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Data (Score:3, Insightful)
DennyK
Re:Glib reasoning (Score:2, Insightful)
I play Gemstone III [gemstone.net] by Simutronics, and know of at LEAST one person whose full time job is just selling items and characters and "coins" for real life money.
Sure, he invested a lot of his time into the game initially, but he makes enough to support himself on it, so that's gotta say something...