[sldev] CAPTCHA to validate land sales.

Dale Glass dale at daleglass.net
Wed Oct 3 09:15:02 PDT 2007


On Wednesday 03 October 2007 17:17:14 Argent Stonecutter wrote:
> Fair enough, yes, you can use human-assisted bots. But once you bring
> a human into the loop, you might as well let that human look at the
> land the bot is buying, and decide whether to actually buy it.
Why? The bots probably hunt for real bargains first of all. Getting a small 
amount like $5 out of a land sale is probably pretty hard. Now if somebody 
sells a 8192m parcel for L$10 for some reason, you're going to grab that 
without even looking, even if you could.

> Because putting the human in the loop at all makes it expensive
> enough that bots that just blindly buy based on area and price no
> longer have the same kind of advantage, and you won't get the
> constant push-up in the price of marginal plots that's keeping the
> price inflated at the low end.
I don't think it will.

Bot or not the thing is: Can you resell the land later at a profit fast 
enough? Dealing with land underpriced by $1 got to be very impractical, 
even with a completely automated bot.

Now, the thing with the captcha is that everybody is going to be slowed 
down accordingly. Both normal people and bot users will be slowed down by 
the same amount, and the bot's user still keeps the advantage of knowing 
much faster what bargains there are.

Plus, with a bot you can still edge it out a lot in your favor. If I was 
running it, I'd display the located parcels in a grid, sorted by potential 
profit, with a very quick and convenient interface. Given enough time it's 
even possible to make a bot teleport to the area and render it. And after 
using this for a week I could probably reply to the captcha much faster 
than a normal resident.

Now, short term, purchases by bots will decrease. But that won't last. 
First because the first person to run a bot that gives the owner the 
captcha will be at an advantage, so everybody will rush that. And although 
humans can't buy land 24/7 it'll only mean it'll open up room for more 
people running bots.

I'm pretty sure that long term, it'll balance out to pretty much the same 
situation as right now, except everybody will lose maybe 30 seconds on 
each purchase for the captcha.

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