Hacker News Reader

Comment by swimfar | Hacker News Reader

Given the choice between a publicized $1.2M lottery win and a secret $1M lottery win, I wouldn't hesitate to chose the $1M prize.

View on HN

And yet in actual lotteries, (a certain sort of) people routinely waive anonymity for the benefit only (I assume) of the lottery organisation/'s marketing department.

Many states require you to reveal your identity to claim the lottery prize.

I’ve been told to setup a blind trust and accept your winnings through this trust

Are you using the term "blind trust" in a non-standard way? My understanding is that it refers to arrangements where the beneficiary doesn't get to know about (or choose) assets held, not where the beneficiary gets to be anonymous.

It’s being used in both contexts these days

Doesn't work in all states.

This is the golden post I always look back to on this subject: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vzgl/you_just_...

That Reddit post is funny to read from a 2020 perspective. Things aren't so stable now.

If I won a $600MM prize, a good chunk of the $30MM spending money would go to buying a large property in rural southern Utah with good water rights, quality arable land that can grow fruits/vegetables/hay, an airstrip, and a defensible position. I would stock it with lots of food, guns, ammunition, and diesel fuel.

Having that retreat is as important to me as having the $30MM in treasury notes.

Buuuut...people who play the lottery generally aren't even good at probability, you can't expect them to be making smart social decisions.

It's pretty common to encounter a lottery that has a positive expected value.

No, it isn't. You have to include the probability of sharing the prize with someone else which always reduces the expected payout to negative.

Even if a lottery has a negative monetary EV it may have a positive utility EV.

It's basically a transparency thing. Otherwise (well, probably in any case), you'll have people saying the lottery was rigged and the money went to relatives of the the officials running the lottery or something along those lines.

[Oops: That was meant to be a reply to why state lottery recipients sometimes have to be public.]

You're confusing the lottery with the McDonald's Monopoly game

Sure, if you want to go to jail for tax evasion.

There are privacy reasons that one might drive one to prefer a smaller, unknown prize.

Finding buried treasure is probably one of the best ways to acquire wealth with very low risk of being detected by the IRS for tax evasion.

Why would it be better than any other random way of getting untracked cash? It would be the same difficulty as if you got a bunch of drug money... you suddenly have a lot more money with no way to explain how you got it.

Treasure retains its value over time - so there's no pressure to launder it - which is fundamentally different from holding a whole ton of cash.

Cash from drug sales is also small bills, and therefore voluminous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com