🎓 Doc Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@qoto.org

@freemo Reminds me of what de Tocqueville said about prisons. Same idea, just with unwanted people instead of unwanted animals. At least I think it was de Tocqueville...

@freemo @khird Appreciate the replies! I waved off a buddy who advised me to buy BTC ~2012 saying "I already have monopoly money" -- guess which of us now owns a whole bunch of office buildings...

Remained 100% leery of the space until this Spring when I was attracted by the notion of 'easy money' through generative art NFTs. Luckily, I realized soon enough that A) While I could improve my coding, I'm not an artist and B) the artists that are making money are people who'd be making art regardless of NFT market. Skill and passion correlate (at least somewhat) to quality of output, hence the top-heavy distribution of earnings.

Relevant book by Nobel economist Robert Shiller "Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events"...

I get the impression that whales and other market makers are more than happy to let segments like ICOs or NFTs pop up every few years, absorb new influx of fiat from retail investors (attracted by press stories on 'easy money'), market runs up, smart money exits near top, then retail gets spooked, market tanks, and long-term hodlers re-enter. Rinse and repeat every couple years. Along the way, the good traders have profited from volatility and platforms like OS take their cut all along the way.

@freemo

No, actually goats are sheep with goatees.

@freemo some further observations:

For any number of boxes:
If you're allowed to choose all the boxes, a win is trivially possible: flip all to heads.
If you're allowed to choose all but one of the boxes, a win is trivially possible: flip all to heads; if you then see a tails turn it to heads, if not turn all coins to tails.

For five boxes:
There's no solution with three choices, because there's no penultimate state from which you can guarantee that you'll choose all the remaining heads or all the remaining tails. So five boxes has only the trivial solutions.

For six boxes:
I have a solution for four choices in five moves, which may not be optimal (I haven't searched exhaustively for other strategies).

The number of patterns for given numbers of boxes and choices is from the OEIS: https://oeis.org/A047996, under "example". I don't understand the notation they use for the generating formula, but they call it a "circular binomial coefficient" which makes sense.