[adamtmca]

"This last caveat leads to an interesting economic question. As noted above, retail prices for CAPTCHA-solving vary over a wide range, from about $1 per thousand to $20 per thousand. This price spread, and the fact that it’s technically feasible to route a CAPTCHA through the system more than once, suggests a major arbitrage opportunity. We can set up a high-price CAPTCHA service and farm out all the actual work to low-price competitors. In a free economy—and what economy could be freer of regulation than a criminal one?—that situation is not supposed to endure."

Finack's comment on the original post was worth noting here: Arbitrage has far more to do with information transparency than the free-ness of the economy, as such arbitrage is pretty common in criminal economies where prices aren't public information.