Treat Coin

The System

I'm taking Cryptography in this term and they also brought up Bitcoin. The mathematically most beautiful things can get ugly and I will never invest into cryptocurrency. I got creative though and coded a little script for managing my money spending habits.

I called this idea "Treat Coin", because it is a currency for your (unnecessary) material desires. It is not related to cryptocurrency and works completely offline. Basically, it generates a random number between 1 and 24. If it is 11 then this is the jackpot and you will gain 4 coins. The numbers between 9 and 16 win something. Let $X$ be the random variable representing the win and $w(i)$ the win if $i$ was drawn. Its expected value is

$$\mathbb E(X) = \sum_{i=1}^{24} \frac 1{24} w(i) = \frac 1{24}\cdot 4 + \frac 2{24}\cdot 2 + \frac 4{24}\cdot 1 + \frac 2{24}\cdot \frac 12 + \frac 2{24}\cdot \frac 14 = 0.5625.$$

In a month this amounts to $16.875$ coins. The next task is to decide how much a coin is worth in your currency. For me it is $2.5$. You can find the Lua scripts here and here (copy them in a folder and name them $\texttt{main.lua}$ and $\texttt{config.lua}$). They only work on Linux, but if you want to use the system, all you actually need is a die, pen and paper. 😉

Why?

I'm aware that there is this drive of wanting things. Nothing wrong with that, but I looked for a legitimation for spending money on these things. It is easy to lose control over this behaviour, because it is highly influenced by emotion. For me it is one of the major coping mechanisms, but it is neither good for my wallet nor the earth.