I would gladly sell you a 256-bit number–that is actually the password to my swiss bank account–for 100k USD. For all you know, there might be a lot of gold in it.

It could have easily been the same person transferring money to themselves though, for either PR or money laundering purposes.

"someone basically bought a 256-bit number for $117,712.12"

The same could be said of Bitcoin. At least with Kitties you get, well, a Kitty :)

An Ethereum private key is 256 bits. I'd buy a 256-bit private key for an Ethereum account that holds $1m for $100k.

as opposed to paying millions (billions?) for a chunk of carbon?