A brief analysis of the Dave Rhodes chain letter
The Dave Rhodes chain letter is a famous example of electronic chain letter which has appeared several times on the Internet. It has a list of 10 people and suggests you forward the letter to to bulletin boards (not people)! A twist with this letter is that you start to receive money when you get to position 5 on the list. Just assume for this analysis that only the person who posted the message you read was honest (that is, just making copies and passing it along - not in on the beginning). Let's see how the generations go until you could see some results:
Copies in generation |
Your postion |
100 |
10 |
1,000 |
9 |
10,000 |
8 |
100,000 |
7 |
1,000,000 |
6 |
10,000,000 |
5 |
So by the time you could get any money out of this, the message would have appeared on over 11 milion bulletin boards! Do you think there are that many? Even if we were only talking people, that would be a healthy number. There aren't enough people in the US (let alone bulletin boards) to maintain two more generations.