This is one of my favourite books ever...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Player_of_GamesThis is one of my favourite blog posts ever...
http://oliveremberton.com/2014/life-is-a-game-this-is-your-strategy-guide/I used to play a game called earth 2025, and then later another called StargateWars. Both strategy/resource/efficiency type games, huge timesinks. I would spend hours thinking of how to optimise my play. Turn out these are transferable skills.
Money is just a sub game. Complicated by the fact you are compelled by your human desires and emotions to play a less than perfect game. That's just part of the challenge though. Knowing you can't play prefect you have to devise a strategy that still works. When BTC cam along it was like I'd discovered some crazy bonus side quest. Some secrete room that you stumble across in adventure games full of traps and treasure. Its interesting because its fairly easy to do pretty well, but the temptation to do *really* well could make you end up doing really badly.
So far I'm doing pretty well on this sub quest, I think all them years playing games give you a real advantage.
As for this contest, I devised a strategy that maximises my chance of winning. Not just to win the contest itself, but to try and ensure the best overall outcome for me. I placed more importance in winning in scenarios where the prize was worth winning, hence I weigh in heavily bullish in my guesses. My goal was/is if BTC goes nowhere, then I have no chance of winning the $600, but if it goes to $10k I want the highest chance of winning $16k. To win is to understand the scoring system and how best to use it to get points.
Because of the format - i.e. having to guess 8 months out, harvesting big points for black swan type events felt the most statistically sound (most +EV) way to play, especially given bit coins historic price volatility. I also based it on my experience of how people tend to assign probability to events. They often under assign probability to outliers, and over assign to stasis, in particular when long timescales are involved. In the trial round I played this way, because it was a short time. However in this contest the timespan is huge, and so the chance of 'black swan' is far higher than people intuit. Rpteila mentions this earlier in the thread when he talks about the potential for price to be vastly different from where it is now.
For this reason I knew I wouldn't have to assign too much probability to outliers and still be way ahead in terms of points if they came true. I would still have enough to defend from elimination in the case of no price action. Finally, it's impossible to get big points on no price action because everyone is going to cluster their probabilities around the current price, so even if you are right, you are fighting for scraps.
If you can accurately predict where the price is going over 8 months, then you would easily beat my strategy, but the odds are that you can't do that, if the price does start to rise quick I have already locked in big scores from the first round. So even if you assign high probabilities in the coming months, everyone else will be adjusting their distributions upwards too, limiting your winnings.
Its still a way to go and as other players see how I'm playing they might try and adjust accordingly, but I think by then it will be too late. This first month was the critical one, ensuring you get big points for any large movements over the coming months, whilst protecting yourself from elimination if the price doesn't move.
For those who would say this is gaming (well, yeah it is, see first few links!) ...my entries represent the most statistically likely spread of price action imho. That's why I think they are most likely to win. So yeah that's gaming - and I think is ultimately what rpteila wants out of this - the most statistically likely spread of future price action!