This thread is entirely hypothetical.
Say I’ve made a really improbable discovery of something that seems genuinely magical. I could use it to easily win the JREF million dollar challenge prize if it still existed. Sadly it ended in 2015, so I’ll have to make do without that. I still want to maximize my profits, though.
Exactly what I’ve discovered… I’m not going to blow that secret quite yet, not until I have the business model worked out in a lot more detail. Thus this thread. 
As far as I can tell, there are no laws in the U.S. against what I can do… yet. That might change as soon as I go public, though. Obviously I can’t find out for sure that there isn’t some obscure law somewhere in some jurisdiction that covers this until I reveal exactly what the trick can do. I am sure there will be some people very angry that this trick exists, more on that below.
This magic causes a permanent effect on the person I perform the trick on. I can only do it on one person at a time. The magic requires the subject’s active participation; I can’t do it to someone unwilling. I am very sure that there are a large number of people in the world who will want to pay to have this magic trick done to them. I believe they’ll be willing to pay a lot. How much, I really don’t know. I can’t even begin to estimate the number of digits in the price I can charge yet.
I’ve discovered a big limitation in this trick I can do: It requires a scarce non-renewable resource, call it unobtainum. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. There’s no more to be had anywhere on Earth. There are orders of magnitude more people who would like this done than I have unobtanium for. Exactly how much I have, see below on that.
I have to get close to the subject to perform the trick on them, but it’s not necessary to touch them. I just need to get close enough to sprinkle the unobtanium on them as we each do our separate parts of the procedure.
The trick only needs to be done once per customer, and doesn’t wear off. I estimate the customer satisfaction rate will be well over 95%. I’m mostly certain that examining the customers after they’ve had the trick performed will reveal next to nothing about how the trick was accomplished. As far as I can tell, nobody knows yet how to test for unobtanium residue.
I’m sure once it’s proven that I’m not a fraud, there will be many governments and other powerful people and organizations who will be very interested in this magic trick, and probably won’t take my word on it that there are such a limited number of uses left.
There will be a large number of people who would love to have this trick done on them but won’t be able to afford it. They’ll think I’m being very unfair to them by selling my service at a high price. They’ll be vocal about it on social media.
There will probably be a significant number of people who will claim that what I am doing is wrong for religious or moral reasons.
If possible. I’d love to somehow hide my identity from everyone. I foresee a giant target painted on my back once I go public with this. I have a few ideas for selling this magic via the dark web and taking payments in bitcoin in an effort to keep myself fully anonymous, but I don’t know how well that can work in practice.
I’m ultra paranoid about the U.S. government and maybe many other governments throwing a lot of resources into capturing the secret of this magic trick. Every method I’ve thought of that makes it hard for the government to track me down involves a lot of prep time for each customer, such that I will be lucky if I manage a rate of one customer per day. It might have to be a lot less frequent than that.
So, given the above details, and a highly mercantile mind, how would you go about extracting the maximum amount of cash from this discovery, safely?
Would the amount of unobtanium I have left change the business strategy? I think I should probably reveal the approximate amount I have left, but not sure about that yet. I don’t know exactly how many total customers i’ll be able to take; my estimate is only accurate to plus or minus 10 customers or so. For now I’ll say it’s somewhere under 1000.