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gwern comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 8 - Less Wrong
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Is there a difference, from the magical point of view, between Muggle allies slaughtering each other to fuel Grindelwald, and slaughtering non-allied Muggles to fuel Grindelwald?
Arguably, his Muggle allies (assuming, as usual, that these are the Nazis) were indeed sacrificing themselves: they started a war which they lost, leading to their deaths (in many cases) by war, hanging, or suicide (the last including the Muggle Fuehrer himself).
However, I interpreted this as Sheaman did; sacrificing others may be less powerful, but it was a lot of others.
In a number of magic systems, the willingness of a sacrifice can have a huge impact on its effectiveness, ranging anywhere from a willing sacrifice granting significantly more power than the unwilling to requiring the sacrifice to be willing for it to work at all.
I'm uncertain where Potterverse stands on this, let alone MOR!Potterverse.
Assuming Voldemort's ritual in GoF was more than empty words, willingness is important, or at least notable, given:
Italics added to emphasize parts concerning consent.
Also, many parents in the holocaust were forced to either leave there children or die. Many were forced to sacrifce themselves for their significant other or watch them both die. Consent (as wormtail shows) can be based on a wide variety of factors that might not involve you being truly aligned with how you feel about the ritual itself. A muggle might walk into the gas chamber willingly to save his/her spouses life but the harry potter verse never deals with "how much consent is consent".
I wish that this comment weren't buried behind "continue this thread"; I don't want to be the only one who votes it up.
Sure. So in one ritual we know of, consent and lack of consent matters. But that doesn't argue much one way or the other about the proposed scheme for how burning your magic might be a winning strategy.
My point in bringing it up was that we don't know if his minions were sacrificing themselves or others, so the last step is still an assumption.
Even if Grindelwald managed to have minions loyal enough to sacrifice themselves, though, there's no guarantee that anyone else's minions would be that loyal. I'd say that it's a gamble pretty much no matter what.