Did you hear the one about…
by David Wong
So a guy decides he’s going to, via a series of convoluted transactions on the internet, try to trade a single red paperclip for a house. It’s taken some time, but he’s actually done it.
The way this was explained to me was that he would make a chain of small favorable trades (this paperclip in exchange for a pencil, the pencil for a used calculator, the calculator for a pair of shoes, and so on until he got the house). He eventually tired of that and wound up just convincing a senile old man that the paperclip was magic and got him to sign over the deed to his estate in exchange for it. The old man eventually died on the street.
