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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?"
Subject says it all really. What was it in the end, $5 million, $10 million?
This article, The Name Game cites these firms charging around $75,000 for a single word that may only be seven letters long. Not a logo, not an ad campaign, not even a domain registration, just the single word. I guess this runs roughly around $10,000 per byte.
The guy who used to run SunTrust (and donated several millions of dollars to the business school at Michigan State), Eli Broad, once spent 2.5 Million dollars on paintings at an auction. All charged to his American Express.
The US Department of Defense paid untold millions for zero bytes, which means there is a divide by zero error in this hypothesis. Recall that when the war on terror began the DOD bought all the time that Ikonos was over Afghanistan. This was effectively to ensure that it produced zero bytes of information.
I cannot remember the exact (or even approximate date) but at some point during the history of the British Empire (i believe between about 1550-1850) the King has a series of watchtowers built, streaching all the way from the atlantic ocean to London itself. The idea was to have the tower by the sea be on the lookout for the spanish Armada, and to light a signal fire in the tower to signal to the next tower, and to the next tower, and so on , until the signal reached London. The construction and staffing of these towers would literally have cost a King's forture, the equivelent of many billions or trillions of dollars today. And the entire purpose was to pass on the signal fire - a SINGLE bit of information. Not even a byte, just a bit. I believe this is the most costly piece of binary data ever transmitted.
Try http://www.egold.com
A while back, you used to be able to look at the daily gold transactions clearing, and I was rather impressed at the amounts being shoved around by a fifty cent transaction fee, or thereabouts.
There seems to be more finality to transactions there than at a bank, so you can perhaps more-accurately say that the account amounts are guarded by the bits of the encryption.
That's nothing compared to the cost of a single panorama from the Venera probe series. Considering the number of probes they vapourised under testing here on Earth and killed on the way down to Venus, probably in the tens of megabucks per bit, for a few thousand bits.
They also sent back most of the first picture from the Moon after several failures and had the sender die partway through the image, using earlier, perhaps therefore costlier technology, but OTOH also had a bathtub rover (Lunakhod) up there running around for years taking holiday snaps.
Either project covers a lot of goats, a lot of sex, or both.
I don't know how you bitify handwriting, but the Yanks spent a bazillion dollars developing a pen that worked in vacuum at any temperature. The Russians used a pencil.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Business.com went for $8,000,000, $666,666.66 ber byte.
Interesting question. Ok, here we go - a test of my history abilities. I am calculating from united states and soviet union only, not factoring UK/Canada/Austrila, etc, etc. Not to offend anybody or in anyway diminish there contribution but this I don't wnat this to turn into an all day project.
United States
10% (avg) of GDP from 1941-42
37% of GDP from 1942-1945 (avg)
GDP(in billions) 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945
113.5 144.2 180.0 209.0 221.1
Defense Spending: 11.4 53.4 66.0 77.3 81.8
Total Defense: $289.6 Billion (note: roughly 1/3 of this went to the pacific theatre)
Casulties: 292 000 dead (estimating cost of lives is NOT something I am going to do)
Soviet Union
Casulties: 13.6 million armed forces, 7.7 million civilian dead (note: roughly 1/2 of those who entered service in soviet military where either killed or wounded. Estimate the cost of that!)
Note: No official records of cost of WWII to Soviet Union have ever been released (that I know of or could find). Estimates are on the order of $350 billion counting damage to infrastructure, etc.
Soviet Union (350) + US (191.1) cost: $541.1 billion. unadjusted for inflation
"We Win" = 48 bits of ASCII code. Each Bit = 11.27$ billion dollars. Rough adjustment for Australia,NZ,Britain,Canada,etc = 13.45 billion dollars/bit unadjusted for inflation
Not taking into account casulties, thousands of other unknown/unquantifiable factors.
Sources:
A war to be Won - Murray and Millet
The World At Arms - Reader's Digest (publisher
Us Gov't GDP - IRS website
You make good points. I followed "valuable" by "invaluable" perhaps more for assonance than semantics.
;)
Neil Stephenson makes good light of your first point in Cryptonomicon (ie. detachment 2703+1), and certainly your second is adamantly indicated by Sun Tzu's fundamentals. Who am I to disagree?
However, I would hazard that one could permit the definition of invaluable (valuable beyond estimation) for Enigma insofar as it provided options to the Allies that would not have otherwise been available. I am not qualified to answer that authoritatively, but certainly Stephenson's fictional history indicates this to be permissible, if not appropriate.
Just a couple set-uid bits here and there made the Internet Worm possible.