The last few trades surprised me. A KISS-themed snow globe is worth more than a year's rent in Phoenix? Someone would trade a house for a speaking role in a film?

You can read more about the snow globe on the one red paperclip blog. It still kind of left me scratching my head though: http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/2006/05/one-kiss-snow-gl...

By the last few the site had gained quite some notoriety so being part of it suddenly skews all the trades to being highly in his favor.

Honestly, most of the trades are baffling to me. A generator is a lot more valuable than a camp stove. A snowmobile is a lot more valuable than a keg and a sign. I'm not sure there's any insight to be gleaned from this except that people in the early 2000s were willing to make illogical trades at their own expense to be part of a wacky internet thing.

This is about the same time a burned piece of bread was sold to an online casino for $28000. As a marketing expense, perhaps well worth it.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna6511148

In Canada people traded with him to become part of the legend.

It looks like after some point his story had enough public interest that free publicity became a factor in the trades, and that definitely helped him climb the value ladder in the trades.

Yeah. This is better a story about how value dynamics are much more complicated than they might look on paper. It's performance art, not a lesson in supply and demand.

This is a pretty fun thing to try to do with trading cards. Back in the day when I played Magic/Yugioh, I'd start with a janky common card and see how much I could turn it into. You have to exploit differences in how people value cards: the valuations of cards online mostly follows the way competitive players value them, but there are tons of people who play casually and others who just chase shiny/cool looking cards. It was relatively easy for me to turn a janky card into another common card that was useful in competitive decks (ex: fissure/smashing ground in yugioh), and trade those for janky holos with competitive players, which I could then turn into more useful/valuable holos with the collectible/casual crowd, and so on. It's super fun to do a few times just to know that you can pull it off.

Isn't this actually mathematically the same as arbitrage? :D

It's literally, identically arbitrage.

No, arbitrage is a combination of trades that essentially risk free as they offset each other.

This is just regular trading. Every time he swaps a card, he takes the risk that he won't be able to offload the new card.

Doesn't arbitrage come with slight risk too? The spreads are always fluctuating, and if you don't time it right (in say high-frequency trading) you might not be able to offload whatever you just bought at a good price either.

Strictly speaking, yes, there are risks associated.

But there's still a wide difference between those risks, and speculating on the (not-immediate) future.

The absolute best part of this entire wacky story is where he says on air "I will go anywhere in the world except for Yahk, British Columbia." so someone from that area calls him the next day.

http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/2005/12/one-trip-to-yahk...

Coleman stove for Honda Generator is quite suspect.

I'm guessing early on the goal went from this:

* solve the challenging puzzle of getting from paperclip to house

to this:

* decide which of a thousand rabid fans of your site you want to choose, perhaps some of whom are already offering you an entire house for a coleman stove

A Honda generator costs 10x-3x as much as the stove

Was it new? Maybe it depreciates just real quick???

This is still being done and I find it interesting but always suspect. I saw one person doing it in my area and in the early times they "traded" for a vacuum cleaner but I am certain that was actually a vacuum that was being given away free. Not really illegal or anything, but it does give you an idea, people traded for something trivial because the thing they traded was something they were throwing away. People give away stuff that is worth hundreds of dollars. People would be surprised. But ultimately that makes the paper-clip to something worth a few hundred dollars relatively easy. I think it starts getting really steep really quick. You can't increase the value of your object by 50% every time. You're just increasing by a little bit. But the one I know of recently started getting trades that were actually companies who were benefitting from the social media profile. So even if they "lost" in a trade they gained promotion from being involved with the project.

>But the one I know of recently started getting trades that were actually companies who were benefitting from the social media profile. So even if they "lost" in a trade they gained promotion from being involved with the project.

That was an even bigger factor in the original one.

Reminds me of the million dollar home page... it is still up: http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/

I love that ling's cars is still working!

https://www.lingscars.com/

Not just working, I'm quite sure they keep gathering traffic just as a curiosity. The site works on phones, though differently. And the site's team gave technical talks on how they maintain that madness.

Nice blast from the past! I remember this one. I believe the founder tried to create a follow-up called Pixelotto. By the time it was released, the novelty of the Million Dollar Homepage may have run its course.

The founder is Alex Tew and he cofounded the Calm meditation app which has almost certainly eclipsed Million Dollar Homepage for eyeballs/world impact!

There were a lot of copycats as well.

Not many links are working now.

Also so much poker and online casino ads! I was almost disappointed that there wasn't porn.

I did something like this in college:

pencil - can of bug spray - first aid kit - floor lamp

I only did it for an hour, and it was kind of fun. I think it makes for a great activity for college students, and those with a little bit of perseverance, might make something substantial of it.

I would guess that the total travel costs of this are probably comparable to the cost of the house. This looks like a comparable house (roughly $55k US in 2020): https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/600-3rd-St-S-Kipling-SK-S...

So do the same but walk. Got it

The story is missing a lot, with no details on the travel expenses that made several of the trades possible: X -> Vancouver -> Amherst, Mass. -> California -> Queens, NY. From that point, the article just says "he traded..." without mentioning the mechnanism. Leaving all that out, it's not quite the story of one red paperclip x 14 trades = a house.

In like 2011 or so a bunch of kids came to my door trying to do something like this. I don’t remember what they brought to trade but the only thing I could think of was a big CRT TV I was planning to take to Best Buy for recycling, which they were really excited about. A couple hours later they brought it back because nobody would take it.

and reading the webpage, the Japanese did it first:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_Millionaire

It's sort of like watching a really good movie, then finding out kurosawa did it 60 years ago.

Did he pay taxes on any of these barter transactions, or did he take the position the house is worth exactly one paperclip?

I read when the original trades were shared online so the story is no surprise to me. But the links in the 'See also' section, especially 'Gudbrand on the Hill-side' made my day.

If curious see also

2018 (a bit) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16875577

Or see 29 days ago, when this user last posted this exact same link.

True, but that post got no attention and no comments, which means (1) it's ok to repost (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and (2) it's best not to link to it from another thread (otherwise users click, find nothing there, and get grumpy).

Why allow Wikipedia links at all? They’re almost always mundane and receive little attention. Seems like an abuse of a service that’s intended to generate informed discussion.

It depends on the topic. If it's an intellectually interesting, specific topic that hasn't been discussed much, Wikipedia submissions can be fine. If it's a generic or well-trodden topic, that's not good. Generally the best third-party article would make a better submission, but that's not always possible.

This has come up quite a few times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Thanks, I should have searched myself; I was pretty sure there must have been previous community pushback against Wikipedia links. I usually read New without logging in; if others commonly do the same, they may be developing the impression that ‘pedia links to popular common topics is a-ok.

Thanks for your moderation work!

I was intrigued until I saw that the house is in a thousand-person village. It feels like the trades were downhill after the truck. I mean, my cousin bought a house in a 30000-person town for ~5000 usd—likely not much of a house but still.