My thinking was more mundane; gold foam with a solid shell. But yeah, seems like there's a lot of possible sources of error in the size/weight of a Galleon magic or no. Still, given the volatility of the Muggle marketplace and the isolation of the wizarding world in general, it seems likely that some arbitrage opportunities exist.
Not that I should care about the destruction of a fictional economy, but I much prefer the idea that arbitrage is only, say, 10%, and Harry decides to strike a long term business relationship with the goblins rather than taking an adversarial position and crashing the market in a big way. He could even introduce the idea of representational currency, which ought to be worth quite a bit to the goblins.
He could even introduce the idea of representational currency, which ought to be worth quite a bit to the goblins.
Given what I’ve seen about goblins up to now, I’d rather expect their reaction to be somewhere between “ROTFLMAO” and “Blasphemy!!!1!!”
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 81, which should be published later today. The previous thread passed 400 comments as of the time of this writing, so it will pass 500 comments soon after the next chapter is posted, if not before. I suggest refraining from commenting here until chapter 81 is posted; comment in the 12th thread until you read chapter 81. After chapter 81 is posted, I suggest all discussion of previous guesses be kept here, with links to comments in the previous thread.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.) When posted, chapter 81 should appear here.
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,nine, ten, eleven, twelve.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: