Or Stellar flops and the guy just spent 24 hours of his life and $50 or so dollars to accumulate a bunch of useless not-even-paper. It could go either way. The mechanical turk workers implicitly made the bet that stellars will not be worth much more than they are worth today in the future - and were thus, reasonably, willing to trade nothing for real actual money that's there right now.
Otherwise known as "Arbitrage" and something that any commodity, let alone currency faces in the first 30 seconds on the market.
If it wasn't Everett, there is a 100% guarantee that if there was money to be made, that any one of another 10,000 people would be immediately utilizing this mechanism.
Comments
Or Stellar flops and the guy just spent 24 hours of his life and $50 or so dollars to accumulate a bunch of useless not-even-paper. It could go either way. The mechanical turk workers implicitly made the bet that stellars will not be worth much more than they are worth today in the future - and were thus, reasonably, willing to trade nothing for real actual money that's there right now.
Those same workers could have traded in their 5000 Stellars for $50 on Stellar Forums. Everett was actively selling 5K Stellars at $50 [http://forum.stellar.org/t/i-want-to-buy-your-stellars-50-fo...], while buying them at $1 on Mechanical Turk.
Otherwise known as "Arbitrage" and something that any commodity, let alone currency faces in the first 30 seconds on the market.
If it wasn't Everett, there is a 100% guarantee that if there was money to be made, that any one of another 10,000 people would be immediately utilizing this mechanism.
Ok - think of $49 as the cost of not having to figure out what Stellar is and where the opportunity to sell them at a higher price exists.