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Or Stellar flops and the guy just spent 24 hours of his life and $50 or so dollars to accumulate a bunch of useless not-even-paper. It could go either way. The mechanical turk workers implicitly made the bet that stellars will not be worth much more than they are worth today in the future - and were thus, reasonably, willing to trade nothing for real actual money that's there right now.

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Those same workers could have traded in their 5000 Stellars for $50 on Stellar Forums. Everett was actively selling 5K Stellars at $50 [http://forum.stellar.org/t/i-want-to-buy-your-stellars-50-fo...], while buying them at $1 on Mechanical Turk.

Otherwise known as "Arbitrage" and something that any commodity, let alone currency faces in the first 30 seconds on the market.

If it wasn't Everett, there is a 100% guarantee that if there was money to be made, that any one of another 10,000 people would be immediately utilizing this mechanism.

Ok - think of $49 as the cost of not having to figure out what Stellar is and where the opportunity to sell them at a higher price exists.

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