I thought this was cool at first, but if I'm understanding this correctly, it's a total ripoff.
Right now, the site tells you that the highest unique bid is $73.62. In other words, the $73.62 bidder will win unless someone else bids that amount. But there's no reason for anyone else to bid that amount, since any new bidder at that amount cannot win.
(Even if every single price level has been taken, the second bidder at that level will always lose to the first bidder)
Moreover, since you can see every bid by clicking on the History link (hint: click on Next, but use your browser to open in a new window, then change the URL directly), I found that every unique bid for the top 900 or so price levels has already been taken. The only way any new bidder could win would be to select the highest remaining unbid price (I think it was $64.05), then hope that all 900-ish price levels above them were duplicated between now and the end of the auction.
Basically, the only chance of winning is to get in on the action really early, bid a few cents below the top price before anyone else has a chance to put in that bid, then place duplicate bids for every price level above that point if necessary.
In other words, this looks an awful lot like a very sophisticated chain letter. Put an item up for "auction", place the first few dozen bids (or more to be safe), then find 3100 dupes to spend $2 each placing bids that have basically no chance at winning.
If the current high-unique bid and the bid history were hidden from view, then that would be another story -- a new $73.62 bidder wouldn't know for sure that it cannot win, and no one would know what's been duplicated already. So you're much more likely to see a lot of dupes at the top, and a lot more people would be in the game. The early birds aren't guaranteed to win, but being among the first few hundred bids would still be a huge advantage since duplicate bids automatically lose, and there is a declining probability of placing a non-duplicate bid as the number of bidders increase.
