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Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

Anyone got a spare 1Trillion note they could send me?

There's a shop near my office here in Hong Kong that sells 100 Trillion Zimbabwean notes (amongst other old notes, coins, jewelry, etc). I bought quadrillion worth, although I guess it's worth a bit less now :)

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152998973018758&l=...

You can just buy some on eBay.

I once made a wager (which I lost) with a friend for "a million dollars" as a joke, but then found that you can just buy trillions (at the time) of zimbabwean dollars easily, so I bought some and delivered :) Funnily, they sell it on eBay at a price higher than their exchange rate (and that's excluding shipping).

Doesn't that allow an arbitrage situation, where you can buy Zimbabwe dollars through official channels and then sell them on E-bay for more than they cost you? Or maybe the "official" exchange rate is depressed through shortages and risk in completing the transaction.

I think supply/demand may get in the way: not that many people need zimbabwean dollars, just some collectors and those who seek them for novelty value. Market will become saturated pretty quickly.

There are also websites that try and pump up the currencies as get rich schemes.[1]

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/2gzafs/spou...

>Funnily, they sell it on eBay at a price higher than their exchange rate

Doing the opposite of that would mean a man delivering letters with money in them with nothing in return. Sounds too philanthropic, especially when we're talking about money here.

I haven't thought about it this way, this actually makes sense. Insane margins threw me off.

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