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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

In high school I thought of the opposite idea:

“This website contains a timer for seven days. If this timer reaches zero a one million dollar donation will be made to numerous charities. The button below resets the timer.”

I was going to call it “This is why we can’t have nice things”

But I couldn’t find a million dollars.

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In high school I made a little game with a similar feel. It showed a tower of stones, same for everyone online. To add a stone you needed to hold mouse for about 7 seconds. There was also a massive red button to collapse the tower. The record was about 350 stones placed.

I love the ideas in this response. To reset to the timer requires donating $$ to the cause.

I love the game theory of this.

For a charity, you could choose a good cause that upsets assholes. So they have to donate money to the charity to prevent it from getting the money that was donated.

Last donation dictates the charity that gets the money and resets the timer

And the minimum amount must be >= last donation.

Edit: Wait, are we reinventing poker?

Sounds closer to reinventing the penny auction (where did all those sites go?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidding_fee_auction

What if you donate on behalf of a charity and which ever charity has most donations gets the entire pot?

Someone from 4chan will just write a script to keep it from ever running out.

Make it so only one entry per IP address? The script would very quickly run out, assuming they couldn't spoof (not sure how easy it is to spoof IP addresses).

Not very easy, but this is what bots are for

IPv6? ;)

You could make it accept donations and/or start with a much lower value like that 100 or 1000.

What if the button was to donate a certain (very small) amount? Perhaps incorporate an escrow account of some kind?

It’s an idea. The problem is that the button has to be trivially pushable by anyone. No payment screen in between cause and effect.

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