This is really an argument to have with those who advocate signing up. But as it's directed to me, I'll point out one factor that needs to be included in that calculation.
What's your value for a micromort to you?
What's the size of a micromort?
A millionth of an ordinary lifetime, or a millionth of the lifetime one might have if cryonics pays off? Given commensurate advances in medicine generally, if you get revived, you might expect a much longer lifespan.
BTW, it would take a lot more than $5 to persuade me to drink a gratuitous half litre of wine. For me, that amount would be close to throwing up in the street and having the following morning wiped out recovering from the hangover. I've done that a few times in the past, but only enough to know better.
People value their lives but most don't value their lives above everything else in the universe and would prefer to give their grandkids a college fund rather than taking a long shot at immortality.
Some do prefer that, some sign up for cryo, some can afford both, some neither, and some do completely different things with their resources. People are different and there's no need for everyone to do the same thing.
For that we'd have to get into QALY's which is tough since we can't make any kind of reasonable estimates for how many QALY's someone would gain (perhaps future government decides to deal with a population crisis by setting maximum year limits).
Micromorts aren't perfect but do make it possible to compare because 1 micromort suffered today can be used to judge cash value something is worth. If you'd accept a minimum of $10,000 to perform a 100 micromort task today(making you quite a bit more cautious than average) that still reduces your chances of immortality even if you're signed up for cryonics which allows you to do some kind of cost/reward tradeoff calculations.
Every so often, I see a blog post about death, usually remarking on the death of someone the writer knew, and it often includes sentiments about "everyone is going to die, and that's terrible, but we can't do anything about it have so we have to accept it."
It's one of those sentiments that people find profound and is often considered Deep Wisdom. There's just one problem with it. It isn't true. If you think cryonics can work, as many people here do, then you believe that people don't really have to die, and we don't need to accept that we've only got at most about a hundred years and then that's it.
And I want to tell them this, as though I was a religious missionary out to spread the Good Word that you can save your soul and get into Christian Heaven as long as you sign up with Our Church. (Which I would actually do, if I believed that Christianity was correct.)
But it's not easy to broach the issue in a blog comment, and I'm not a good salesman. (One of the last times I tried, my posts kept getting deleted by the moderators.) It would be a lot better if I could simply link them to a better sales pitch; the kind of people I'm talking to are the kinds of people who read things on the Internet. Unfortunately, not one of the pro-cryonics posts listed on the LessWrong wiki can serve this purpose. Not "Normal Cryonics", not "You Only Live Twice", not "We Agree: Get Froze", not one! Why isn't there one? Heck, I'd pay money to get it written. I'd even pay Eliezer Yudkowsky a bunch of money to talk to my father on the telephone about cryonics, with a substantial bonus on offer if my father agrees to sign up. (We can discuss actual dollar amounts in the comments or over private messages.)
Please, someone get to work on this!