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$81 Billion Gas Tab
denobug writes "Ever wonder how expensive a tank of gas could get? How about $81 billion! Juan Zamora had his PayPal debit card maxed out after a routine gas fill up, the transaction cost him $81,400,836,908. Makes me wonder whether the glitch is the debit card transaction system or in PayPal's system."
So he called customer service for PayPal... [who] argued with me for 10 to 15 minutes. Like I had to prove that I didn't pump $81,400,836,908 in gas!
Yes, in the late 1990s I had trouble with PayPal. I emailed customer service about a dozen times and never got a response back. I have never considered using PayPal again.
Assuming 2 dollars per gallon, the man would have had to purchase 40700418454 gallons of fuel to generate such a bill. That is 1.54067844 × 1011 liters, 154 067 844 cubic meters or 0.154067844 cubic kilometers of fuel. Lets just say, having that much fuel in one place would be a good example of a bad idea.
Lets consider how much energy that would be. Assuming 34.8 MJ per liter there would be 5.36156097 × 10^18 Joules of energy. The Hiroshima bomb released about 6.3×10^13 joules of energy. That would make it about 85104.1424 Hiroshima bombs or about 30 kilograms of antimatter.