Mighty oaks from little acorns - or in the case of 26-year-old Kyle MacDonald from Belcarra, British Columbia - mighty dreams from little paperclips grow.
In July last year, MacDonald, who describes himself as having "planted more than 100,000 trees" and "delivered more than one thousand pizzas", offered up a single red paperclip for barter on his blog.
His idea, based on a childhood game called "bigger and better", is ingeniously simple. For the paperclip he was offered a pen, for the pen a doorknob and for the doorknob a barbecue stove.
In a kind of entrepreneurial twist on the old woman who swallowed a fly, a series of further trades later - a generator, a keg of beer, a snowmobile and a three-day trip to the Rockies - he is currently the proud owner of a Ford box van.
And his eventual goal? "I'm going to make a continuous chain of 'up trades' until I get a house. Or an island. Or a house on an island."
To play "bigger and better", participants went door-to-door around their neighbourhood, starting with a paper clip and trading as they go. The person with the most unique item after a specified time wins.
MacDonald has stayed true to the principles of the game, including making each exchange in person, but he has expanded the context enormously.
"The first offer [to trade] came after couple of hours. There were offers from all over the world," he said. "But I happened to be in Vancouver at the time, so I made the trade in Vancouver," he told the Journal, published by Queen's University in Ontario.
Further trades have taken him as far as California and New York.
He told the Journal he hopes to make oneredpaperclip.com a site where anyone can offer an item and make trades.
"It is fun to look at all the things that people are offering," he said. "It will be a form of eBay, but with barter."
MacDonald's scheme is refreshing in a money-obsessed age, not least because it challenges the widely quoted belief that nothing in this life - apart from love and happiness, of course - is free.
The comment section on his blog is peppered with bile and insults - presumably from people furious that they didn't come up with such a fine idea themselves.
