If you read the story, you’ll meet someone who knows they are going to hell already.
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And before they get there the bottle takes a journey through a third-world economy where the smallest available currency is worth considerably less than a penny.
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Just so.
Buying at 1c is a surefire way to wind up in Hell, but as Stevenson’s story shows that might not be a dealbreaker for some people. As long as there is someone irrational enough to buy at 1c, buying at 2c isn’t necessarily doom. As long as some people believe that someone might buy at 1c, and therefore would risk 2c, buying at 3c is safe.
At each level of abstraction, the danger of being caught with an unsellable bottle seems more remote, which means more less-than-perfectly rational people will be willing to chance it.
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If I buy the bottle for 1 cent, I have to sell it for less but I cannot give it away or otherwise pay somebody to take it.
So can’t I just get one more thing worth 1 cent and sell them both for 1 cent. Package deal, no splitting allowed.
After that, the Nth seller needs to bundle it with N things worth a cents. It would also work to bundle it with one thing worth N cents. Since 1/(N+1) < 1/N, the conditions hold. This will avoid an exponential growth.
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A rational person would assign infinite harm to landing in hell, and thus would only buy the bottle if they were completely certain they can resell it. In othe words, if the estimated probability of reselling the bottle approximates one. Meaning, of all the people you can contact during the rest of your life, at least one of them will either:
- Be unable/unwilling to rationally evaluate the risk of landing in Hell (assuming everyone will want the magic bottle), or
- Be rational, and estimate their own chance of reselling the bottle as approximating one.
This rational estimation is recursive so the expected number of people that could buy the bottle at some point in the transaction chain grows exponentially until the possible buyers comprise the whole population of the earth. So the question can be restated as: ¿What’s the probability that at least one living human will be unable/unwilling to rationally evaluate the risk of landing in Hell? If you think it’s equal to one, you should buy the bottle at $1000. Except…
There’s a big flaw: the main risk is not that the bottle ends up unsellable, is that you die before selling it. Even if you think you can buy the bottle, use it, and resell it extremely fast (say, five minutes), the chance of a sudden death during that time is higher than zero. So it’s not worth the risk of landing in Hell.
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It’s a fun little trick-taking game played with a unique deck. It can be played online at http://www.onlinebrettspiele.de/flaschenteufel/1995/ (which uses the 1995 artwork, which I prefer to the more recent 2003 edition)
English rules are here: http://www.bambusspiele.de/spiele/flaschenteufel_2003/e_flt_rules.htm
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I read this story years ago, and it’s still excellent, but the one looming plot hole for me still exists: why do none of the bottle owners wish for a way to stay out of hell?
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Well you still have to weigh that risk against the risk of ending up in some version of heaven that admitted Evangelicals.
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The paradox is that the bottle does not look (L)imp.
Well, I’m buying that bottle. Wish number one is that my hell is really nice, and burning is really nice too.
Just change currencies. A quick Google search shows that the Iranian Rial exchanges at 41,994 to the dollar (not included black market values). So, buy it for a penny, sell it for 418 IRR (less than a penny) and let the game continue. 
Come to think of it, get a partner and work the currency exchange rates for a while and then sell the IDEA for millions while selling the bottle for less than you purchased it.
I was just wondering if there were any places other than the US, and if they used money.
You’ve got a surefire way. That would totally work. No one else came close.
Now, I just so happen to have this bottle right here, and since you’ve got the best plan for beating it…
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I didn’t realize it has been around for so long. I have a Z-Man games edition dated 2010 that has text from the story all over some of the cards. Bit of an odd decision.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned that Douglas Adams used this plot in his “The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul”.
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I’m already there!
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I’ll give you 418 IRR for it.
The original edition just came in a clear plastic deck box and didn’t have an actual bottle token like the later boxed editions, it had two cards with a bottle imp printed on it that you were supposed to use to create a standup figure (which I never did).
I’d gladly trade that wooden bottle for the much more manic/devilish artwork of the original.
If you did this, then you’d go to heaven, right? But you can’t because you had the bottle. Then the universe ends, or something something …
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Which gives us an interesting alternative ending to the story.
someone who bought the bottle, and used its power do good in the world, while willingly risking their own soul to do so, and saving others from the risk of ending up with the bottle, would be carrying out a brave, charitable and self-sacraficing act. That is the sort of thing that (if you believe) gets rewarded by a higher power than an imp.
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