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Bugmaster comments on Post ridiculous munchkin ideas! - Less Wrong
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Upvoted for the fact that the author actually implemented the idea into practice. Too many other posts on this thread are just theorycrafting.
That was what impressed you? Not my creation of a real-life financial perpetual motion machine?
As far as I understand (and I could be wrong), your machine does not actually generate money, but merely defers payment until some future date. It does so by essentially exploiting a bug in the Kindle + Credit Card system, and it has an upper limit of whatever your max credit line is. My guess is that if this trick becomes popular, someone will patch the bug (probably Amazon, credit card companies are pretty slow).
So, don't get me wrong, it's a nice hack, but it's hardly perpetual or earth-shattering. One similar trick I know of is to have several credit cards, and use them to keep transferring the balance between them before interest accumulates; but this is less efficient, since the "free balance transfer" special offers occur relatively rarely.
Okay, "perpetual motion machine" might have been hyperbolic -- the comparison I had in mind was to what we might call a "weak" perpetual motion machine, which doesn't generate energy but is exactly frictionless, so it twirls forever without energy input.
Interesting! Didn't know about that variant.
Do it for long enough and inflation will eventually reduce the debt to a negligible amount. In twenty years, at three percent rate of inflation, your debt will only be worth 54% of what it initially was!
The hack generates money if you invest the "loan" into something that pays interests in less than a month. Not enough money to be worth your time, of course; but it's still infinite free money for a given value of "infinite".
The hack generates money if you invest the loan into anything that pays interest. It requires fiddling to be done monthly but the investment can be anything and can be ongoing.
We could perhaps consider it a time value generator limited by max credit. This could be reasonably analogized to a perpetual motion machine with an ongoing finite output.
What does Amazon have to gain from patching it?
I'm assuming that the constant churn of purchases and returns costs them money. For example: