This is a favorite hypothetical of mine.
A bored devil enters our dimension and offers you a bargain. If you cut off one finger, you get ten thousand dollars. For every additional finger you cut off, the reward increases by an order of magnitude up to ten trillion dollars.
You must make your decision immediately, the devil will retract his offer in five minutes.
Finger-related fine print:
You can choose which specific fingers you keep.
The fingers have to be cut off right now, but you don't have to do it yourself. The devil will cut them off for you if you don't want to.
You don't get to keep your removed fingers, the devil takes them with him.
You won't die from your wounds or get an infection or anything like that.
Economic fine print:
The value the money represents is magically added to the world's economy, so the devil's bargain is not inflationary.
The devil will also provide you full legal services free of charge and guarantees that your reward is post-tax. He can invent a reason for your windfall with a paper trail or keep the money perfectly secret.
If you prefer, the devil can provide equivalent reward in another currency of your choice.
I'll probably make a market about the results of this poll shortly, depending on how much disagreement there is.
Edit: There is no disagreement so instead we can bet on
/Joshua/what-would-manifold-do-with-ten-tri
Related questions
Do we get any say in how the magical economic growth is distributed? It'd be a bit of a shame if we inadvertently exacerbated global wealth inequality
I posed this to my friend and she didn’t realise that I meant her fingers, and on closer reading it doesn’t say the fingers have to be yours at all! She says she’d cut off all of the devil’s fingers and 4 of her own for 100 quadrillion dollars. I’m scared of her loophole-finding ability and the devil should be too
@NcyRocks you can't give away something that's not yours in the first place, so that's no loophole. (There's no reason why contracts with the devil should not follow general principles of law.)
Or maybe it is allowed to cut off his fingers; your friend loses four fingers for $10,000,000 and the devil loses ten for $10T, which means she now owes the devil $9, 999,990,000,000. Good luck to her!
@BrunoParga The description is very clear: not about how many fingers you give, it’s about how many you cut off!
Note that under this interpretation you could ask the devil to cut off everyone’s fingers, for ~$10^40,000,000,000...
@NcyRocks Considering that the value is created alongside the money, it would be worth taking everyone's fingers, even against their will. Even if you burn the money and do nothing, the Devil would need to provide you with Dyson Spheres around every star, ASI, and probably a source of virtually unlimited free energy to back the value of the money. Maybe it even has to be unlimited to account for interest rates.
If you get advance notice or you get the deal now and also in 20 years, I would probably breed as many people as possible just to have more fingers to sell to the devil.
The effort would still be worth it even if you can only deliver 1 or 2 marginal fingers on top of "all fingers in the world", and I think I can get significantly more than that.
@Mira They might not even have to be human fingers - you could probably breed monkeys, or some other species that has fingers.
And they might not have to be alive, so when any of them die it’d be worth preserving their hands.
A few points:
if my reward is post-tax, do the corresponding taxes get paid? (Like, not deducting from my ten trill, but as tax revenue for the corresponding jurisdiction.) If so, I should ask to get the money in whatever country would tax me the most, weighted by how much good I think they would do with it.
Since it must be right now, I presume it's without anesthesia, right? I know I won't die, but what other short-term effects will there be from the amputation itself? Will I be left bleeding? Bandaged? Can I count on the Devil to do it in the least painful way possible? Can I choose the order the digits turn into digits? (I'd go for right index first, right thumb second, then I think the order doesn't really matter.) Can they drop me off at a hospital afterwards for any care I might need? Can the devil or doctors do anything about phantom pain?
How do I actually use the money? Do I get a contactless credit card tied to my wrist?
1) Receiving the money in the country that will get the most in taxes and use it the best is genius, though you only have 5 minutes to google which country that should be!
2) And yeah, devil has promised you no anesthesia. He's got a big knife, and then it's a trip to the hospital where he promises you won't die or get an infection.
3) Actually he gives you a checkbook.
