You can certainly look at lotteries that way. But the “friction” you mention is typically rather large. You would probably do better to go and play roulette, or make repeated risky stock-market investments. For that matter, some of your “MWI-selves” will in any case just happen to receive big piles of money from eccentric millionaires, surprisingly successful employers, and the like.
So there’s nothing very special about lotteries, and I suggest that the way to minimize friction and get more money to your possible future selves is to choose random money transfer schemes other than lotteries.
Which random money schemes do you think would be best at this?
Or, for a tougher challenge: for people with relatively limited resources to spend on such a project, which such schemes have a reasonably low barrier to entry?
Which random money schemes do you think would be best at this?
Bitcoin, interestingly enough. Bitcoin has multiple competing blockchain lotteries which are often provably fair, and which generally take <2% in fees, while offering high-leverage bets; for example, SatoshiDice famously paid out 1920btc on a 0.03 wager.
These are using cryptographic hashes, which are unpredictable but deterministic, so they’re not immediately applicable to MWI. What you could do for MWI purposes is use a quantum RNG to choose at what point in a day (or month) you bet at; since each block gives you a different chance at winning, quantumly choosing between enough blocks can essentially guarantee a win for at least one branch.
So, assuming you had the necessary bitcoins on hand, this is actually a very easy way to leverage up (far easier than some suggestions I’ve seen like trading foreign exchange options). Run the RNG, send it whenever, and within 10-15 minutes you’ll have won a large fortune or lost a small one for a fee of ~1.8% of your bet.
I was actually thinking about this as a strategy for myself. I have a decent number of bitcoins (I began accumulating what I could back in May), but I don’t have a life-changing number of bitcoins. On the other hand, if I bet at, say, 10:1 odds on SatoshiDice, that combined with future bitcoin price increases would be life-changing. I could fire up a quantum RNG, ask it when to bet over the next week, bet, say 25btc, and in one of 10 universes, walk away with ~248btc and cash out for $200k.
Is this a great idea or a terrible idea? I really don’t know.
I wouldn’t suggest anyone cash out all of their bitcoins… rebalance them instead. I’m actually surprised I haven’t heard about any wealthy people/hedge funds/etc. using volatility harvesting strategies to trade bitcoins, their volatility is so insanely high it seems like an obvious strategy.
I suspect the answer depends strongly on your initial resources and just what you’re trying to achieve. Your best prospect for becoming a billionaire might not be the same as your best for becoming a millionaire. (Though, I dunno, it might.)
If you’re young, intelligent and living in a fairly rich country, and don’t mind waiting a while and doing some work in order to get the money, your best bet may be the unexciting one of trying to get a reasonably lucrative job—software development, medicine, law, finance—and then work hard and live frugally for (depending on other factors, notably including luck) somewhere between about 5 and about 20 years. Given sufficient determination, this gives you an excellent chance of becoming a (dollar) millionaire, and a quite respectable chance of doing much better than that. But it requires a lot more time and effort than buying a lottery ticket; this probably doesn’t meet your “reasonably low barrier to entry” criterion.
Many gambling games have very little “friction”. Some (e.g., poker) greatly reward intelligence and effort; if you can make yourself a good poker player then you can probably turn (say) $1000 into $1000000 with probability somewhat over 10^-3. Some (e.g., roulette) are basically pure chance, so no investment of time and effort is required or indeed helpful. If you want to play them at high stakes you’ll probably need to go to casinos and put up with their rake-off, but the friction is much less than in lotteries.
Once you’ve turned your (presumably small) initial investment into something more substantial (with low probability, but let’s not worry about your counterparts in other Everett branches who weren’t lucky enough) you may do better to switch from pure gambling to stock market speculation. There’s still friction, but I think brokers will eat less of your money than casinos.
I doubt there are many opportunities around that have genuinely low barrier to entry and let you do much better than pure chance would allow—because if there were, they’d already have been used up by arbitrageurs.
You can certainly look at lotteries that way. But the “friction” you mention is typically rather large. You would probably do better to go and play roulette, or make repeated risky stock-market investments. For that matter, some of your “MWI-selves” will in any case just happen to receive big piles of money from eccentric millionaires, surprisingly successful employers, and the like.
So there’s nothing very special about lotteries, and I suggest that the way to minimize friction and get more money to your possible future selves is to choose random money transfer schemes other than lotteries.
Which random money schemes do you think would be best at this?
Or, for a tougher challenge: for people with relatively limited resources to spend on such a project, which such schemes have a reasonably low barrier to entry?
Bitcoin, interestingly enough. Bitcoin has multiple competing blockchain lotteries which are often provably fair, and which generally take <2% in fees, while offering high-leverage bets; for example, SatoshiDice famously paid out 1920btc on a 0.03 wager.
These are using cryptographic hashes, which are unpredictable but deterministic, so they’re not immediately applicable to MWI. What you could do for MWI purposes is use a quantum RNG to choose at what point in a day (or month) you bet at; since each block gives you a different chance at winning, quantumly choosing between enough blocks can essentially guarantee a win for at least one branch.
So, assuming you had the necessary bitcoins on hand, this is actually a very easy way to leverage up (far easier than some suggestions I’ve seen like trading foreign exchange options). Run the RNG, send it whenever, and within 10-15 minutes you’ll have won a large fortune or lost a small one for a fee of ~1.8% of your bet.
I was actually thinking about this as a strategy for myself. I have a decent number of bitcoins (I began accumulating what I could back in May), but I don’t have a life-changing number of bitcoins. On the other hand, if I bet at, say, 10:1 odds on SatoshiDice, that combined with future bitcoin price increases would be life-changing. I could fire up a quantum RNG, ask it when to bet over the next week, bet, say 25btc, and in one of 10 universes, walk away with ~248btc and cash out for $200k.
Is this a great idea or a terrible idea? I really don’t know.
Don’t forget taxes on gambling winnings which will effectively increase your transaction costs.
It’s a good thing that all this is being done in a currency most conducive to laundering and hiding assets! :)
But what if the NSA agent assigned to you turns you in to the IRS?
I wouldn’t suggest anyone cash out all of their bitcoins… rebalance them instead. I’m actually surprised I haven’t heard about any wealthy people/hedge funds/etc. using volatility harvesting strategies to trade bitcoins, their volatility is so insanely high it seems like an obvious strategy.
I suspect the answer depends strongly on your initial resources and just what you’re trying to achieve. Your best prospect for becoming a billionaire might not be the same as your best for becoming a millionaire. (Though, I dunno, it might.)
If you’re young, intelligent and living in a fairly rich country, and don’t mind waiting a while and doing some work in order to get the money, your best bet may be the unexciting one of trying to get a reasonably lucrative job—software development, medicine, law, finance—and then work hard and live frugally for (depending on other factors, notably including luck) somewhere between about 5 and about 20 years. Given sufficient determination, this gives you an excellent chance of becoming a (dollar) millionaire, and a quite respectable chance of doing much better than that. But it requires a lot more time and effort than buying a lottery ticket; this probably doesn’t meet your “reasonably low barrier to entry” criterion.
Many gambling games have very little “friction”. Some (e.g., poker) greatly reward intelligence and effort; if you can make yourself a good poker player then you can probably turn (say) $1000 into $1000000 with probability somewhat over 10^-3. Some (e.g., roulette) are basically pure chance, so no investment of time and effort is required or indeed helpful. If you want to play them at high stakes you’ll probably need to go to casinos and put up with their rake-off, but the friction is much less than in lotteries.
Once you’ve turned your (presumably small) initial investment into something more substantial (with low probability, but let’s not worry about your counterparts in other Everett branches who weren’t lucky enough) you may do better to switch from pure gambling to stock market speculation. There’s still friction, but I think brokers will eat less of your money than casinos.
I doubt there are many opportunities around that have genuinely low barrier to entry and let you do much better than pure chance would allow—because if there were, they’d already have been used up by arbitrageurs.