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That's interesting but doesn't really apply here. The concern I raise is about someone who cares about the conditional value of the asset and whose reward is a step function based on that price (critically with no loss if his proposal fails).

However, I think I'm kinda nitpicking here. In particular, the problem I'm suggesting turns on the fact that the total value the asset pays out to investors on any degree of success will still be less than the total value of the fund so the potential raider of the fund can offer every investor a better payout than they expect to see for the find if the valuation conditional on the proposal failing accurately reflects the expected value of the measure.

I don't doubt that could be fixed either by changing the way the payout works or by simply barring the kind of self-dealing that would allow the fund to be raided.

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Yes, but it seems there is a quite reasonable chance that people trading rationally manage to reduce the profit of the person suggesting investing it in their own pocket lint to whatever is a reasonable rate of return but that it still happens. Or even if it doesn't that these concerns end up being the primary price signal.

For the system to work it needs to be that the price ends up being set by the likelihood of success at space colonization and it's not clear to me that this will be how it all works out.

I mean it might...I'd just like to see a formal model showing that result.

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That is the old issue of price manipulation. Which doesn't work. Others suspect your manipulation and take the opposite trades, correctly estimating that they will profit on average by trading against you.

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What if I propose to `invest' the entire fund in a piece of my pocket lint? Then I can effectively use the value of the fund to subsidize the offers necessary to approve this proposal and effectively raid the fund of all it's value.

In particular, if I understand your (second) proposal correctly when there are $k dollars in the fund (assuming no growth so far) there are k $LYND assets valued between 0 and 1 which can be traded. Now if I propose buying my pocket lint from me for the entire value of the fund the market price conditional on this proposal failing is just the current market price of $LYND which is some e between 0 and 1. I can then offer to purchase ALL k LYND assets for some e' with e < e' < 1 (sufficiently greater than e to result in approving the transaction). I then scuttle the project making (1-e')*k dollars profit without even touching the second fund.

Now arguably the mere foreseeable possibility of such a move pushes the value of LYND up until e' is arbitrarily close to 1 (modulo some measure of the risk of trying the scheme) so there isn't much profit to be made here but it still decouples the value of LYND from anything having to do with space exploration.

Or am I getting something wrong? Even if so how does one stop the value from being determined primarily by the difficulty of raiding the fund in this manner?

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I imagine that the sort of investment I'm talking about wouldn't be too different from just general investing: You assume that most technological paths are dead ends, so you pick a diverse portfolio. In tech, even dead ends can be occasions of learning and experience-gathering. I admit that I do have some specific techs in mind that could use an extra boost, and these are outside my fields. For example, I'd love to see more investment in closed-system automated food production. I admit that might be the wrong call. But I think we do have a general idea of how our expansion into space will begin, and what problems the process will present.

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The bottom of the ocean and Antarctica aren't appealing locals. The Himalayan mountains would probably soon move to be protected should humans seriously begin to colonize the peaks.

Anyway, what's the key to space colonization and exploitation? Probably the ability to get into space cheaply. There are better, cheaper, and more scalable technologies than rockets to get into orbit. That should be the focus.

As I see it, private enterprise easily putting a bunch of stuff in space is an enormous risk for national governments. I would not underestimate the eventual resistance on that front.

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I agree that in principle this could be helpful, but the vast majority of those with passion to help space colonization aren't remotely qualified to pick these marginal techs, nor to evaluate who would be so qualified. I have serious doubts if anyone is well qualified here.

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It's a good idea and I would invest at least $2. I've been thinking about another way to accelerate our transition to becoming a space-faring civilization: Investing on the margins of technologies that we need on Earth, but whose advancement will be crucial to our capabilities in space. I'm basically talking about all kinds of automated resource extraction and the flexible control systems that make this possible. I'm sure that there are terrestrial mines that could be much more automated without a big marginal cost. Paying a company to fire miners and transition to automation might be cheap, and once the automation is in place, it's bound to improve more quickly and spread more widely. A small payment could push it over the threshold. We should expect that processes in space will be tweaked versions of processes that first became economically viable on Earth. The space-specific tweaks might turn out to be only like 10% of the total effort. If we could identify and fast-track the other 90%, we'd have something to invest in now. Many scientists and engineers are now working on space colonization tech without realizing it, because terrestrial projects are behind their paychecks. Forward thinkers might now try to identify future bottlenecks and allocate funds to prevent these.

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