It is considered a good form to summarize your main point in a reasonably plain English, even for a complicated research paper, let alone a forum post. Give it a try, you might gain some broader audience.

Is it generally better to edit an existing post or just retract it? At this point after reading the replies it's obvious that I missed some important facts and there might not be much of interest left in the post.

Another standard step is looking up the existing literature and referencing it. The issues of Pascal Mugging, unbounded utility functions and largest computable integers have been discussed here recently, are none of them relevant to your problem?

Is there a better way to find the topical posts on LW than the google site search? I tried to find all the posts about pascal's mugging but apparently missed some of the more recent ones about bounded utility. That may have just been an oversight on my part, or using the wrong search terms. I also try to follow the list of recent posts and thought I had read all the posts about it since sometime last summer.