Online Auction

Everybody knows E-bay, but have you ever looked at any other online auctions. I was interested when I saw that an I pad 2 auctioned for $42. The site was www.dealfun.com and I wanted to see how that could be possible. To bid on items you must purchase bids in bundles and they cost from 40 to 60 cents depending on the amount you purchase. The price on any item starts at 1 cent and increases by 1 cent for every bid. Wait a minute, that means I can only bid one penny at a time and it cost me 40 cents to do it. In the last 15 seconds of bidding each time someone bids the time resets to 15 seconds, this is the online version of going once going twice. So, as long as someone is bidding, the auction continues, sometimes for hours. This is where I lost interest in even trying for the I pad 2. But, I became interested in the math behind the $42 I pad 2. There are other factors like bidding on packs of bids and spinning a wheel to win bids and possibly unseen factors also, but this is the basic math. It took 4200 bids to reach $42 dollars, at 40 cents per bid that is $1680.00, at 60 cents per bid it is $2520. The last I pad 2 sold for $248.71. You do the math.