[sldev] CAPTCHA to validate land sales.

[Argent Stonecutter]

On 03-Oct-2007, at 13:32, Dale Glass wrote:
> On Wednesday 03 October 2007 19:59:52 Argent Stonecutter wrote:
>> You're still not looking at what I'm talking about.
>>
>> Right now, the bot operates with no human in the loop. So it's not
>> cost-effective to do anything that might require a human.

> Not in the US maybe. There are countries with internet access where  
> $100
> can be a monthly wage.

The absolute cost of doing this doesn't matter. It's the relative  
cost of doing it with a bot (using, say, a cheap virtual host  
somewhere) versus doing it with a human (including the cost of  
managing the human). If the human costs $400 a month (4 people in  
shifts) then that's at least 10 times the cost of using bots.

Look, if it was cost effective then people would be doing it, and out- 
competing the people running dumb bots.

>> If everyone has to have a human in the loop, then it becomes cost-
>> effective to do more things to make smarter buying decisions. So land
>> that a bot would have bought for L$4/sm will be left, if it's low
>> value land that's obviously not going to sell to any humans at a
>> price that will make a profit.

> L$4/sm is low enough compared to L$7/sm to make a very good profit  
> on it.

Only if it sells. L$4/sm might be a fair price for the parcel. The  
only reason it's going to get pushed up to L$6 is because it gets  
bought by a bot that resells to another bot... and then sits there  
until it gets abandoned because it's not worth the tier for whatever  
bot on the tail of the chain ended up with it. Which means that the  
people just looking for land to mess around on who don't care about  
the giant toilet are competing with the people looking for a nice  
spot, and pushing up prices at the low end. This keeps the  
equilibrium price higher than it would otherwise be.

> But in that case I don't see the point, because if a human who  
> looks at it
> won't buy, but a bot who can't evaluate those characteristics will,  
> why
> would you want to keep the bot from buying it?

Because it drives up the price of the tail of the market, which  
drives up the market as a whole.

> After all, you get to get
> rid of land in an awful location and selling it for more money than
> anything with a brain would have paid for it :-)

For the market as a whole that is not a good thing, because it  
removes that kind of land from the market... and there would  
otherwise be a market for that kind of land.