The point is that Eliezer succeeds convincing a person who was formerly unconvinced...

Convince him about what ? If the point is to convince people about the necessity of developing a Friendly AI, then a certain amount of cheating might be justified.

Well, sure, but having now admitted that, this means that your testimony about both this and other similar scenarios constitutes very weak evidence

It's even worse than that, since I personally have never played the game against EY or anyone else, and thus I have zero credibility. I'm actually ineligible under the stated rules, because I'm fairly certain that a transhuman AI (assuming such a thing could exist, of course) could convince me of anything it wanted. I am far less certain that EY or any other human could do the same, but, sadly, this does not improve my eligibility.

...surely it would be much easier to not play the game at all, just find someone that claimed to have played it with you.

Good point. I agree.

He'd probably have to bribe me with more than I make in two years to even consider cheating in this fashion...

Fair enough, but another way to phrase this sentence is, "my testimony could be bought for a price". All that remains now is the haggling.

Lastly I think some people here may be forgetting that after the initial 2 successes by Eliezer, he repeated the AI-Box game another 3 times with raised stakes -- and his ratio of success then was 1 victory and 2 defeats.

Ah, I did not actually know that. Still, as you hint in your final sentence, it's pretty tough to know whether EY is running a Xanathos Gambit or not, due to all the secrecy.

By the way, I do not mean to imply that I'm pronouncing a moral judgement on anyone in any way -- neither on EY, nor on yourself, nor on any other AI-game players. I'm evaluating the game from a strictly rational and morality-agnostic perspective.