A Joke, A Scam

There's a guy with a street stall under a pedestrian overpass. He asks you to write numbers from 1 to 10 while he times you. You breeze through it, so he offers you a bet: if you can write from 1 to 500 without a single mistake in five times that duration, he'll pay you 500 yuan; otherwise, you pay him 50. You think it's easy, but you're highly likely to lose—because most people can't do it.

What if someone actually can? What if they just go stall to stall, taking on these bets one after another? Simple—they win 500 over and over again.

What kind of money are people losing to the stall operators? It's the money of the law of large numbers. No matter how simple the task, repeat it enough times and human error creeps in. Small-probability events eventually become inevitable.

So what kind of money does that winner make from the stall operators? It's the money of excellence—the money earned by surpassing the vast majority. You'll slip up within 500 attempts; I won't. I can go 5,000, 50,000, 500,000 before I make a mistake. In these bets limited to 500 repetitions, I'm a king, effortlessly crushing the青铜 (bronze-tier) players.

He can do it, and that's his edge. What he does is what he gets paid for—he earns money that others simply cannot.