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?"

Comments

Credit Card Numbers

[elphkotm]

People with credit card limits in excess of several million dollars, their number sequence and expiration date can be stored in just a few bytes (8 bytes at the most).

Data

[hayek]

The problem with your comment is in the assumption that the only thing being sold is a username and password. Obviously the buyer thought they were buying something a little more substantive.

Re:Data

[Ephemeriis]

Not exactly.... The buyer is generally interested in purchasing an EQ account for more than just the username/password, they usually want what that username/password grant access to. They're interested in the high-level character, or phat lewts, or whatever else may come along with the username/password. However, the key to those other items is the username/password. The only thing that is transmitted, transferred, or sold to another person is the username/password, which they then use to access the rest of the goodies. The same is true of a bank account number, or credit card number - those things in and of themselves are completely valueless, simply alphanumeric strings - but what they represent and grant access to makes them valuable.

yrs,
Ephemeriis

Re:Data

[dan the person]

Yeah, so when i spend 200K on a house all i am buying is a bit of paper and a key.

Re:Data

[DennyK]

Actually, that's pretty much true. All you get for your money is a piece of paper that says the Folks In Charge won't object to your occupancy of a particular plot of land and any structures on it. Of course, you attach a particular value to your ability to live somewhere without behing harassed or removed by force, but what it really boils down to is you giving the guy who currently has that piece of paper some money, and transferring that agreement to yourself.

DennyK

The most value has got to be in passwords...

[Sun Tzu]

Imagine the price for byte of an eight-character password that lets you change your grades, retroactively, to all 'A's. Satellite pictures and Human genome are lots of bytes.

Headlines.

[blair1q]

"We win" -- VE Day, 5/8/1945

Calculate the cost of that.

--Blair
"Hint: don't just count $."

Glib reasoning

[SirSlud]

> 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.

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:Glib reasoning

[taernim]

Everquest is more "high profile", but several large-scale text games have had this "buying a character" phenomenon occur.

I play Gemstone III 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...

Re:By that logic I bought an expensive key...

[GigsVT]

Well, I posted on the root level that license keys are probably the most expensive byte for byte, because in that case it is different, usually you have the full software installed, for free, and you just need to pay for the license key to use it. Almost all expensive software comes with a demo key before you buy it, but it ships with the full software package, so you can just unlock it once you get it integrated into your workflows.

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

[debrain]

Give a man a fish and tomorrow and he will be hungry the day after. Teach a man to fish, and he will subsist. Certainly, algorithms then are the most valuable. Take DeCSS - how many bytes was that down to? Look at it's financial, freedom, and legal implications.

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

No, you don't get the character file.

[phriedom]

The entire premise of the post is that you DONT own the character file. That is the property of the software company. All you buy is the info to access. That is why this is different than any real property, like a house.