I don't think that the probability of Bitcoin's success is so low as to qualify for Pascal's Mugging status. While it is difficult to value the worth of a 5% or 1% chance of success, or whatever value one assigns, its still nothing like 1/3^^^3. It simply isn't low enough probability, or high enough payoff to qualify as a Pascals Mugging.

If you want to actually approach Pascal's Mugging territory with Bitcoin, then you need to change from the question "What is the chance that Bitcoin will capture 10% of the Gold market", to something much less likely such as "What is the chance that (a future version of Bitcoin which uses its current blockchain ledger) will eventually become the main currency of a future post-singularity human civilization expanding outward at some fraction of the speed of light".

When you imagine a scenario such as Nick Bostrom's astronomical waste: http://www.nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste.html and you ask the question "what is the probability that buying Bitcoin now would give me the resources needed in the future to allow us to colonize the Virgo Supercluster one second faster, thus saving the equivalent of 10^29 potential human lives", THEN you can say that you are getting Pascal's Mugged.

Or you could imagine other questions, such as "what is the probability that my buying Bitcoin now would enable me to secure life for humanity in a future run by an AI that is unfriendly but can be negotiated with, and has been programmed to desire Bitcoins?" Now you are actually being Pascal's Mugged.

(Obviously these are incredibly low probability scenarios, not things that I think will occur. That is why I am using them as Pascal's Mugging examples).

Nitpick: BTC can be worth effectively less than $0 if you buy some then the price drops. But in a Pascalian scenario, that's a rounding error.

More generally, the difference between a Mugging and a Wager is that the wager has low opportunity cost for a low chance of a large positive outcome, and the Mugging is avoiding a negative outcome. So, unless you've bet all the money you have on Bitcoin, it maps much better to a Wager scenario than a Mugging. This is played out in the common reasoning of "There's a low chance of this becoming extremely valuable. I will buy a small amount corresponding to the EV of that chance, just in case".

Edit: I may have misread, but just to make sure, you were making the gold comparison as a way to determine the scale of the mentioned large positive outcome, correct? And my jump to individual investing wasn't a misinterpretation?

I guess in every situation we should support the more peaceful alternative

I don't think so -- pacifism fails rather badly. Sometimes you just need to kill the bastards.

But if I may ask a general question -- what led you to offer a suggestion in the area about which you know practically nothing? This isn't snark, I am really curious. You probably wouldn't offer advice on how all the surgeons in the world should operate, so why did you take it upon yourself to suggest changing religions for a billion people?

development of a new religion or variant of Islam

Perhaps someone who knows more about Bahaism (without being one of them) could tell whether promoting Bahaism might be a way to stop violent Islam.

Bahaism tries to be the next version of Islam, so for people who need religion in their lives it should be easier to convert from Islam to Bahaism, as opposed to Christianity. At this moment, Bahaism seems like a peaceful religion; which of course can be due to the fact that they are an oppressed minority at most places. But still, some peaceful memes could survive even if they would grow.

So, the strategy is that non-Islamic countries should support on their territory the Bahai preachers trying to convert all Islamic immigrants to their faith. First, more peaceful religion is preferable. Second, let's give our enemies one more problem to care about, so they have less time to spend on fighting us.

I'm running an Ideological Turing Test about religion, and I need some people to try answering the questions. I've giving a talk at UPenn this week on how to have better fights about religion, and the audience is going to try to sort out honest/faked Christian and atheist answers and see where both sides have trouble understanding the other.

In April, I'll share all the entries on my blog, so you can play along at home and see whether you can distinguish the impostors from the true (non-)believers.

I'm running an Ideological Turing Test about religion, and I need some people to try answering the questions. I've giving a talk at UPenn this week on how to have better fights about religion, and the audience is going to try to sort out honest/faked Christian and atheist answers and see where both sides have trouble understanding the other.

In April, I'll share all the entries on my blog, so you can play along at home and see whether you can distinguish the impostors from the true (non-)believers.

Original Ideas

How often do you manage to assemble a few previous ideas in a way in which it is genuinely possible that nobody has assembled them before - that is, that you've had a truly original thought? When you do, how do you go about checking whether that's the case? Or does such a thing matter to you at all?

For example: last night, I briefly considered the 'Multiple Interacting Worlds' interpretation of quantum physics, in which it is postulated that there are a large number of universes, each of which has pure Newtonian physics internally, but whose interactions with near-identical universes cause what we observe as quantum phenomena. It's very similar to the 'Multiple Worlds' interpretation, except instead of new universes branching from old ones at every moment in an ever-spreading bush, all the branches branched out at the Big Bang. It occurred to me that while the 'large number' of universes is generally treated as being infinite, my limited understanding of the theory doesn't mean that that's necessarily the case. And if there are a finite number of parallel worlds interacting with our own, each of which is slightly different and only interacts for as long as the initial conditions haven't diverged too much... then, at some point in the future, the number of such universes interacting with ours will decrease, eventually to zero, thus reducing "quantum" effects until our universe operates under fully Newtonian principles. And looking backwards, this implies that "quantum" effects may have once been stronger when there were more universes that had not yet diverged from our own. All of which adds up to a mechanism by which certain universal constants will gradually change over the lifetime of the universe.

It's not everyday that I think of a brand-new eschatology to set alongside the Big Crunch, Big Freeze, and Big Rip.

And sure, until I dive into the world of physics to start figuring out which universal constants would change, and in which direction, it's not even worth calling the above a 'theory'; at best, it's technobabble that could be used as background for a science-fiction story. But as far as I can tell, it's /novel/ technobabble. Which is what inspired the initial paragraph of this post: do you do anything in particular with potentially truly original ideas?

3) Voldemort is evil and cannot be persuaded to be good; the Dark Lord's utility function cannot be changed by talking to him.

I am surprised that using transfiguration and defeating Voldemort played such a large role in the solution.
I thought that it was much more likely that the solution would be to lose in some way, but to lose in a way that maintained hope / constrained Voldemort's actions to not be evil, and then to continue to work towards a better situation once out of immediate danger.

I also thought that the Vow that Harry had made would be the biggest key to the solution. After all, transfiguring carbon nanotubes and antimatter were things that Harry could have achieved earlier to defeat Voldemort, prior to the situation having gotten truly terrible. (He couldve done what he did to stun and obliviate Voldemort this during the entire forbidden corridor storyline). Therefore, it made sense to me that the new addition of the Vow would be critical to the solution, not just something throw in to stall for time.

Anyways, I am glad that the community collectively came up with all of the elements of the final solution as it was written.

Statements in Parseltongue aren't binding vows, they're just honest statements of intention.