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gwern comments on Open Thread, October 20 - 26, 2013 - Less Wrong
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Some LWers may be interested in a little bet/investment opportunity I'm setting up. I have become increasingly disgusted with what I've learned about the currently active Bitcoin+Tor black markets post-Silk-Road - specifically, with BlackMarket Reloaded & Sheep. I am also frustrated that customers are flocking to them, and they all seem absurdly optimistic. So, I am preparing to make a large public four-part escrowed bet with any comers on the upcoming demise of BMR & Sheep in the coming year, in the hopes that by putting money where my mouth is, I may shock at least a few of them into sanity and perhaps even profit off the more deluded ones.
The problem is, I feel I can afford to risk ฿1 ($200), but I'm not sure that this will be enough to impress anyone when split over 4 bets ($50 a piece). So I am willing to accept up to ฿1 in investments from anyone, to increase the amount I can wager. The terms are simple: whatever fraction of the bankroll you send, that's your share of any winnings. If we bet ฿2 and you sent ฿1, then you get half the winnings if any. (I am not interested in taking any cut here.)
My full writeup of the bet, with some statistics helping motivate the death probabilities I am betting based on: http://pastebin.com/bEuryTuF
If you are interested, you can reply here, or contact me at
gwern@gwern.net, or we can chat on Freenode (asgwernor just visit#lesswrong). I am currently ignoring private messages on LW, so don't do that.Also, please don't express interest unless you are genuinely fine with potentially losing your investment: given my best estimate of the probabilities & their correlations, there's somewhere >10% chance that we would lose all 4 bets as both BMR & Sheep survive the full year.
EDIT: if you really want to get in, I'll still take your bitcoins, but I think I have enough investors now, thanks everyone.
The bet has gone live at http://www.reddit.com/r/SilkRoad/comments/1pko9y/the_bet_bmr_and_sheep_to_die_in_a_year/
I will be price matching whatever gwern personally puts in.
Is that a per-person maximum, or are you only accepting up to that much worth of bets?
Edit: I have contacted gwern via IRC and invested 1 BTC.
That was a per-person limit; I may close it down soon, though (฿3 plus my own bitcoin and recent appreciation, should enough to impress people, and beyond that, I think there's diminishing returns).
don't you mean chance of losing every bet?
If so, no way in hell those are conditionally independent. If not, what did you mean?
Yes.
Of course they are not conditionally independent, that's why I gave it as a lower bound.
Specifically, I think we can agree that whatever the exact relationships, the failure of one bet will increase the chance of failure of all the others: if the 6-month sheep bet fails, then the 12-month becomes more likely to fail, and to a smaller degree, the BMR ones become more likely to fail. And not the other way around. Hence independence is the best-case scenario, and so it's the lower bound, and that's why I wrote ">10%".
Ah, I see. I was confused by the '=' sign.