Some of you are familiar with a 26-year-old blogger in Montreal, Canada named Kyle MacDonald. Kyle is the ultimate modern day horse trader. He has become famous for trading a red paper clip for a house. Yes, you heard right. A paper clip for a house.

How did he accomplish this remarkable exchange? Well, he didn’t have a job, but one day he looked at a red paper clip on his desk and decided to trade it on the barter section of the popular website Craigslist. He asked people to trade with him anything of value, but he was clear that he needed to trade up.

He got a response almost immediately from a pair of young women in Vancouver who offered to trade him a pen that looked like a fish. MacDonald then bartered the fish pen for a handmade doorknob from a potter in Seattle. In Massachusetts, …