What would you do?

If you could press a button that has a 50/50 chance of doubling your net worth or halfing it. How many times would you press it?

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0, and I would sell it to a degen for 50$

This. Best to be safe and comfy.

In a fantasy world, I'd press it until a billion dollars and/or under $10.

In another fantasy world, I'd never press it at all.

In a "real" world, I'd do it until I quadrupled my starting net worth and/or quartered it. I don't like to admit I have a gambling problem, but I truly do. Any time I can bet for double on a 50/50 chance, I try a low risk martingale, and without the martingale available I still go for atleast a 4x win.

Thanks CS:GO

once.

gotta know if I'm lucky or not.

Holy shit. Came here to post this.

Infinite times because I understand probability.
You have a 50/50 chance to lose x/2 or win x.
You're garunteed that if you push it infinite times you'll eventually reach a point where you've won more times than you've lost and you'll reach 100 loses more as well as 100 wins more.
This is not double or nothing, which is a fair bet, it's double or half, which favors you.
If I click it once with 1mil I can end up with half a million less or one million more.
If twice I can end up even (50% chance) or with 750 thousand less (25%) or with 3 million more (25%).
No matter how much you click it you'll never hit zero.

...

>user loses it all
>keeps doubling/halving his penny over and over and over and over

what if my net worth is negative or exactly zero?

as many times as it takes, MATE

using google's "flip a coin"

starting with $200,000
(Heads = double / Tails = half)

Heads - $400k
Tails - $200k
Tails - $100k
Heads - $200k
Heads - $400k
Heads $800k
Tails - $400k
Heads $800k
Tails - $400k
Tails - $200k
Heads - $400k
Heads - $800k
Tails - $400k
Heads - $800k
Heads - $1600k
Tails - $800k
Tails - $400k
Heads - $800k
Tails - $400k
Heads - $800k
Heads - $1600k
Tails - $800k
Heads - $1600k
Heads - $3200k

Might just stop at $3.2 million

this is retarded, it's a 50/50 chance every time you press it, you can get six million halves in a row

but yes, you can press it until the end of time to POTENTIALLY finally double your initial sum user

The probability of that happening is 1 x 2^6000000.
That won't happen in the real world.
If it can go x times bad it can also go 2x times good.
It's hard explaining probability to retards over text.

but you could go for 6.2 Million user, think about all the extra stuff you could buy

>1 x 2^6000000
>The probability

Probability doesn't work like that, retard. You are blending two sets of probability together. That's how idiots are made. Every time you flip a coin is a flip of the coin. You are assuming that the prior flip has any bearing on future flips. It doesn't. Ever. End of story. It is equally probable to flip the same every time as any other mix.

I bet you play the lottery.

I'd press it until I've become a millionaire.

I currently have about 150 euros. So I don't mind pressing the button a couple weeks or even months until I'm rich.

ITT: would you play roulette staking 50% of your net worth

This is not roulette. In roulette you can lose everything and the odds are against you.

>double your money or half it
>expected gain of 25% per press long run
I'd press it till I was a billionaire.

this thread is retarded fuck you

I'd flip a coin to decide.

>I understand probability

This question is not just "x vs x/2", it's a bit different because it depends on how much money you currently have.

The only way you get more money is if you flip heads more times than tails. Think of it this way: if you flipped 100 times, and 50 times it landed on heads and 50 times it landed on tails, you would have gained $0 and lost $0. Each outcome is a equal probability, so we should expect to gain nothing.

The only reason you say pressing the button is "better" is if you flip an unequal number of heads/tails, when you win you win more, and when you lose you lose "less". BUT:

You don't have a higher probability of flipping heads and doubling, you have a 50/50 chance of either losing money, or gaining money.

>You're garunteed that if you push it infinite times you'll eventually reach a point where you've won more times than you've lost
Nope, it's just as likely to lose more times than you've gained. You are not guaranteed anything. If you actually did press it an INFINITE number of times you would just end up where you started because there would be equal heads and equal tails. It's like if you had a button that gave you "$10" or "-$10" 50/50 shot. If you press that infinite times, in the end you will have $0 gained/lost.

I'd never sell the button, I'd sell usage of the button for a few thousand a crack, plus 10% of any gains.

Why stop there? He could have $12.4 millions

You end up with an asymptote aka 0

You guys are retarded. Press the button until you're satisfied with the gain, then stop. If you're prepared to press the button thousands of times, then you will eventually profit greatly. I'd hook the thing up to a solenoid and a script monitoring my wealth, and have it stop pushing at 32x gain. It will get there eventually.

All this really is is a coin flip where you count the heads or tails you get. You just need to stop when your run has 5 more heads than tails, and that gives the 32x payout.
So why did I pick 32x? Because I ran a simulation. Over 1000 instances of simulating flips until there are 5 more heads than tails, I found most runs terminated in less than 100 flips, with only a few taking thousands of flips, and only a couple taking millions of flips. I'll take those chances.

Then I'll document my success and sell the whole contraption to someone for 10 mil.

Then a more interesting question is: what is a fair price for the button?

Arbitrary based on how much money the buyer has and how literally insane he is. Since money and instability seem to go hand in hand, I feel pretty confident I could get some millions for it.

First, asymptote isnt necessarily 0, it just describes a convergent end behavior.

Second, you faggots are mising the bigger point here: You don't get a random number of presses. You get to press until you decide to stop. You have infinite presses BECAUSE its impossible to hit 0. This means that you can continue until you hit a huge profit.

Anyone who wouldn't 1. Set a realistic goal based on some modeling and then 2.Hit the button until they reach that goal is retarded and will be poor forever.

this
>buy a bunch of food to hold yourself over
>keep pressing, or have a machine do it, until you hit $100 billion

An asymptote is an actual number you know.

Hitting it an infinite amount of times would amount to some number between the asymptote at infinity and the asymptote at zero. But never equal to either inf or zero.

>An asymptote *isn't an actual number you know.
is what I meant

retard alert. Pressing it for infinity will get you back to the start

>muh infinity
yes, hitting it truly infinity times would be 1/2 doubling and 1/2 halving, so the position at infinity would be the same as the starting position. but we're not talking about true infinity since no one can actually hit the button infinitely. you can hit the button for 100 years or 1 billion years and it'll still be some positive number between but not equal to either 0 and infinity.

>thinks he's smart
>can't do basic arithmetic
Assuming a close to even distribution between heads and tails you gain money, not break even.

This. I'm simufag and I found that my initial target of 5 was too conservative. Going to 12 is very realistic, with the mode time to target being around a few hours of tapping the button. There's a small chance of needing to do a month+ grind of tapping the button twice a second, but the far greater chance is you get there

A target of 12 gives a gain of 4096x initial.

Fucking math autists in here arguing about asymptotes and shit. This is why engineers are the ones actually getting shit done in the world.

...

press it continuously. theres a lower bound of 0 but an unlimited upper bound. Eventually I'll be a trillionaire.

>This is why engineers are the ones actually getting shit done in the world.
Naw, this thread explains why you need lawyers in the world. OP question was worded so badly it was inevitable that all the autism on Veeky Forums flowed in this discussion.

Just add "If you ever have less than one cent, you lose everything and the game is over." and all the autism is free to drain elsewhere.

...

If you can press the button unlimited times, then it means you can become incredibly wealthy. As your net worth never goes negative, you can press the button until you can get a doubling sequence frequent enough to make you a billionaire. Just build a bot hooked up to your bank account and let it loose.

Essentially this, and I feel like building a site that demonstrates this, because I find it hard to believe people don't realize this.

Start with $100

>3 head, 3 tails:
H: $200
H: $400
T: $200
H: $400
T: $200
T: $100
>$100

>3 head, 3 tails:
T: $50
T: $25
T: $12.50
H: $25
H: $50
H: $100
>$100


Wow, it's magic

Careful with that though. It can take tens of millions of presses to get you out of a bad slump. What you should probably do is press it until you're comfy, then spend your wealth to extract the personal gains. If you end up -14 presses on $1k then big whoop. If you're +6 on 1k and keep pressing then get to -14 later, then you're going to be kicking yourself, and at that point it might be easier to just earn your thousand back by working before continuing to press the button.

My net worth is under 10k.might as well press it till I make a million

>people seriously retarded enough to think if they press forever they are guaranteed to get infinite wealth

>People are this retarded to not run a simple simulation and realize there's a 99% chance of a 1024x multiplier within a couple hundred presses.

...

The answer depends on how much risk you prefer to take.

The expected value is indeed infinite over an infinite number of button presses, but higher amounts of cash yield lower marginal gains to utility.

In other words, a billion dollars is way better than 1 dollar, but 2 billion dollars is really not that much better than 1 billion since you're already rich.

This is called the St Petersburg paradox for those who don't know. Here's an explanation a friend of mine wrote using graphs and shit

nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/areibman/Economics-tutorials/blob/master/Economics of Risk and Uncertainty- Introduction.ipynb

Basically that.

It's just a matter of time until you hit enough wins in a row.

ITT Veeky Forums calls each other retards over a scenario that will never happen to anyone

All you dumb cunts. If I flipped a coin where if I won you'd give me 50 but if you won I'd give you 100, you would always take that bet. Especially if you can never run out of money. You press the button until you get all the money you want.

All day and all night

can someone build simple website with this app so we can check this for ourselves?

/thread

>muh muh muh gambling

Fags BTFO

The first hit would be the most important. When you double you can press it once more without loosing anything. So second time is about winning or not winning but not loosing. If you loose the first the probability to loose a second time is too high.

t. careful gambler

Here you go:

biz-button bitballoon com

The user gave the good answer. The probability to lose once is 1/2 and the probability to lose 6000000 times in a row is (1/2)^6000000. It does work that way and there is nothing you can change about that.

You gain more money by doubling than you lose from halfing

>it actually works eventually
>you go from .00000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 to millions

id press it once then if i got twice id press it again then if i lost id stop

...

I also had that. Keep pressing. You'll make it eventually.

Well guys, I'm going to retire now.

It was fun. The first 20 guys who leave their email address will receive a million dollars from me.

Never mind. Everyone itt gets a million dollars.

PLEASE TAKE THE BUTTON AWAY FROM ME

Ok, now I officially quit.

If you can press it unlimited times then just mash it until I'm a trillionaire

Greed is bad. 34 billion is enough for a humble person like me.

>tfw 1086 button pushes away from billionaire

Wrong pic

Now let's laugh at the guys who said they would only press it a limited amount of times.

Good work.

The price can't go below 0 probably that's why we are always winning?

t. no mathematics pro

that's pretty pointless.
statistically speaking you wouldn't get anywhere with that.

there is no fee and no house edge.
you still woudln't win anything if you didn't stop playing when you feel good.

yeah but your money shouldn't be able to go under $1...
that would end the game fairly quickly in most cases you wouldn't get anywhere with it just like in real life.

should I quit?

gay :/

Never quit until you have all the money.

God, you are retarded

Great job op you've brought out the coin nerds

Its important to only press the button hidden in the forest.

Because if your net worth drops below the value of your clothes..

>biz-button bitballoon com
This.

noobs are stupid press it, 50% chance of making 100% -- 50% chance of loosing %50.

>expected output
(x*0.5 + x*2)/2 = 1.25*networth

None of you guys have heard of gamblers ruin theory

after playing this game, i would hit the button for sure

it's not working out for less than infinite rounds tho
-0.5 +0.5 = +0 ~25%
+1 -1 = +0 ~25%
+1 +2 = +3 ~25%
-0.5 -0.25 = -0.75 ~25%

this is not +0.25 for 2 games.

I always new I had bad luck, but damn..

((0 + 0 + 3 - 0.75)/4 + 1)^(1/2) - 1 = +0.25

>tfw negative net worth
>tfw it'd be mathematically impossible to even reach a net worth of $0 through this method

>what is one half of a negative number

It's still a negative number. You will never reach 0

I've fallen on hard times boys, the Button giveth and the button takes

keep pushing until you make it

Paste this in console

var max = 0;
var target = 1000000000000000;
var amountItem = $('#amount');
var buttonItem = $('#button');

var interval = setInterval(function(){
var amount = Number(amountItem.text().replace(/[^0-9\.]+/g,""));
if(amount > max){
max = amount;
console.log("New Max Reached: $" + max);
}
if(Number(amount < target)){
buttonItem.trigger('click');
}else{
clearInterval(interval);
}
}, 0.01);

>Careful with that though. It can take tens of millions of presses to get you out of a bad slump.

You were absolutely right, you can go so near zero that you seem unlikely to get out of a hole. The best way to do this would be for you have the script ready and a friend handing you a dollar if you ever get stuck too low. Afterwards you can split the quadrillion.

My net worth is currently 250k. I press it until I have probably 4 million. Sure I could keep pressing for a while to hope for a better string, but with 4 million, im fucking done.

I think you just broke the world economy.

A more interesting question is would people still play if once they hit below $1 it's over?

Risky as fuck and no longer a waiting game.