Slashdot Mirror
PayPal Credits Man With $92 Quadrillion
solareagle writes "Pennsylvania resident Chris Reynolds got quite a shock when he opened his most recent PayPal statement — it said he had a $92,233,720,368,547,800 balance in his account. 'I'm just feeling like a million bucks,' Reynolds told the [Philadelphia] Daily News yesterday. 'At first I thought that I owed quadrillions. It was quite a big surprise.' When asked what he would do with the money, he said, 'I would pay the national debt down first. Then I would buy the Phillies, if I could get a great price.' The Daily News speculates that the astronomical balance may be related to PayPal's new Galactic initiative, announced last month, to expand its business beyond Earth."
He should have quickly minted a new coin.
Otherwise he will be asked to pay tax on his income! :-)
...if any existing financial application actually has currency fields appropriately sized for that number.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
2^63 - 1 == 9,223,372,036,854,775,807
Assuming PayPal's currency values are stored in cents, dividing that by 100 results in $92,233,720,368,547,758.07. Looks like a 64-bit signed integer overflowed (or in this case, underflowed), resulting in integer wraparound.
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As I read this I can't help myself from picturing that Austin Powers scene with doctor evil asking for 100 BILLION dollars.
Fake story whipped up by their advertising department. And slashdot fell for it.
2^63 = 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, which almost makes sense if they're using a signed 64-bit int to store this number (or it's just an incredible coincidence). But I wonder what accounts for the minor discrepancy.
I'd never really followed other similar news aggregators before, but I've been following Consumerist for a few months, and indeed, that blog tends to post interesting news a couple days before it ends up here. In fact, it just posted a followup story, that apparently when paypal heard that upon seeing the windfall, even though he the guy knew it wasn't real, he felt compelled to donate 30 dollars to a local charity, paypal offered the guy the chance to donate an unspecified but supposedly substantial amount to the charity of his choice as compensation for the mistake.
What an idiot.
Is it so hard to notice "-" sign in front of those numbers?
Bank Error In Your Favor means you Go Directly To Jail if you try to spend the money.
"it said he had a $92,233,720,368,547,800 balance in his account. 'I'm just feeling like a million bucks"
Someone's not so good at math, lol.
... but on this occasion the suck was in a customer's favour. He could spend all of it and still be morally superior to PayPal.
PayPal changed its name today to PayLoverForWhoYouWouldPerformAnySexualActImaginable in order to more accurately reflect the nature of its customer relationships.
Large Corporation Error in Citizen's Favor means you get anally raped.
Seriously, even if you don't try to spend it, all they have to do is suspect you made it happen and you Go Directly To Jail.
Remember, children, Corporations are not just people, they are important people. And you aren't.
I prefer the term $92 billiard.
I know, the Long Scale is seen as very archaic these days but the short scale just seems to run out of puff too quick. Quadrillion, indeed!
Your ad here.
it was only in an email and not really on his account
No need to pay off the national debt, he would owe the IRS over 36 quadrillion dollars. Even if he only pays Google's tax rate of 2.4%, that's still 2.2 quadrillion dollars.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
if I had 92 Quad dollars Id buy the united states, then kick everybody out and give it back to the indians. Then Id PARRRRRRRTTTYYYYYYYY!
Let's say he actually paid the national debt. I know it's just a mistake, but wouldn't there be seemed lag time between the debt being paid and them correcting it?
If so, what affect would having our debt be at 0 for a day be? For a few hours? Minutes? Seconds?
This is a great example of how when numbers get too large our intuition fails us. The first estimate I could find of worldwide cash supply is about 4 trillion in USD (http://money.howstuffworks.com/how-much-money-is-in-the-world1.htm ).
That means Chris would have had about 23,000 times the total amount available. Cool.
That's awfully suspicious. They better freeze Paypal's account, ignore all e-mails, refuse to admit they did it on support phone calls, and take 3 months to resolve it.
Frankly, I'm surprised their systems were even able to handle a number that large!
'I'm just feeling like a million bucks,' the [Philadelphia] Daily News told Reynolds to say so they could get a clichéd quote from him yesterday.
FTFY
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Unfortunately he didnt even touch that money because when he checked the following day, his account was sitting on 0. Poor guy was too overexcited
Cash and run!
I have a Paypal account too.
*checks account balance*
*sees it's the same as before*
*cancels ordering giant yacht*
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
If I remember rightly, isn't this figure something like 400 times the actual final material value of human civilization once everything's been extracted this century? (Not talking about the fake paper money stuff).
This guy could possibly now buy the entire solar system.
... for a 10% downpayment on a Death Star.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
He could buy everyone in the world a house with that. Bank error in your favor never looked so good :)