FLORIDA REAL ESTATE!
Yeah!
Thaaaaat’s the ticket!
Before Air Conditioning, Florida land was utter worthless.
Buy some nice beachfront, put it in Trust to yourself,–many State & Local Governments used to let you pre-pay taxes years in advance… you dig?
Yeah, but
How likely are you to find a plot of land that remains undeveloped, accessible, and unexplored over several centuries?
If it’s largely inaccessible and unexplored, how are you going to find it?
My family didn’t maintain a homestead or reliable family history to make this feasible. A lot of stuff got discarded or was sold off over the years.
No, that’s a beaming machine. My Time Machine is more like a phone booth/car sized contraption.
Would they be able to tell? They are specifically looking for items in pristine condition. If you claimed it was kept in a hermetically sealed container all these years, I bet they’d believe you.
Hermetic sealing does greatly reduce paper degradation, but it doesn’t eliminate it. And, how likely is it that a comic book would be hermetically sealed by someone in 1938, or a couple decades after? I think it would raise eyebrows with collectors.
So the easiest solution is just to put it in a safe deposit box, Surely you could find a bank in 1938 that will still be operating in 2024.
Sure some banks, like Citibank or Wells Fargo, existed in 1938 and still exist today. But individual bank branches? Not likely.
99.9% pure aluminum ingots can be had right now for relatively low prices.
You need to put your collector’s item in the time capsule buried in the foundations of a skyscraper.
Right next to the box containing the singing bullfrog.
Before you go to the past, make a map of the locations of all major oil fields, gold mines, whatever. Then go to the past, and buy up the land while it is still worthless.
The problem is proving ownership once you get back to the future, and putting people in place to manage it and deal with oil rights when they happen.
If you don’t mind the idea of living a century ago, a good path to riches would be to buy Radio Corporation of America stock at the beginning of the Roaring Twenties.
In my plan, I transport my 20-year-old self back to 1920 and buy $25,000 of Radio stock. That would raise a few eyebrows, so I’d have to come up with a cover story on how I had amassed that much wealth in diamonds or precious metals (roughly equivalent to $400,000 now). If I start selling my holding in mid-1929 and cash in everything by September, I wind up with a cool $5 million, which sets me up in pretty good style (it’d be worth about $90 million now). Who needs cellphones and the Internet?
If I could only take one type of supplies back in time with me, it’d probably be a good selection of stable antibiotics.
Go to the Cavern Club in Hamburg and make a movie (16 mm, in colour) of some unknown band with decent sound recording, bring that back immediately. Top condition, rarest material, should fetch a nice amount and you will have had a lot of fun while doing it. Bring back some records in mint condition while you are at it. People may wonder about the immaculate conservation, but there will be no doubt concerning the autenticity: can’t fake the material from back then.
After you sell high in September, could you later use some of that cash to buy low?
Of course you could buy low! But for getting rich quickly, nothing beats shorting IMO. Short the Dow in September '29, the returns are ginormous! Repeat in october '87 and with the dot. com bubble. When bubbles burst the fall is mostly much faster than the rise before. Timing is of the essence, of course.
Can I recruit myself? I’d just go back to that time I was messing around with bitcoin mining but gave it up because I decided to keep my SETI@home farm running. I bet I could convince myself.
The problem of going too far into the past is claiming ownership back in the future. The way around that would be to make shorter jumps. For example, I could go back just three years, and put all the omey in my trading account at the time on $TSLA, which was trading at $20. Put $50,000 there, then jump forwards to 2021 and sell it for $407. Now I’ve got a million bucks. Reinvest it in a Tesla short, and double your money in another year.
Of course, if you weren’t worried about the other ‘you’ in the past, you could take out a second mortgage on the house, sell the car, whatever. Raise half a million and put it all on Tesla at $20. Now, just three years later you’d have $40 million.
I think you’d be a tad early there.
Unless I missed it, is there some reason I can’t go back with an old Sports Almanac or stock picks? Put the money in some sort of trust for you and your “descendants”.
I’d be careful though, as sometimes the universe pushes back on that.
Oooh, you are clever! Moreso than me …
I do not know as a matter of fact, but
Assume 10 people each bought 1 ticket with the winning number. The winner is the ticket, not the person. So each ticket will be entitled to a separate payout of 1/10th of the total jackpot. So far, so obvious,
Now if I bought 10 separate tickets each with the winning numbers, each at different times from different retailers, I fail to see how that outcome differs, or should differ, from the first. Each ticket gets 1/10th of the total, and I cash in all 10. I could do so separately on different visits to lottery HQ if I wanted. And take some as cash and some as the annuity.
[Setting aside the concern that they’d find it highly insanely suspicious that one person bought 10 separate tickets from different vendors all with the same numbers and those numbers hit the jackpot.]
When you buy a ticket, you really buy a piece of paper that represents one or more separate chances. My personal usual is to trade $20 for 10 randomly chosen “quick pick” chances on one piece of paper. So my physical paper “ticket” is really logically 10 unrelated logical single-chance “tickets”.
Anyhow, if I had bought 10 identical chances on one piece of paper all with the winning number, and nobody else had that winning number, then I’d win 10/10ths of the jackpot, with each chance paying 1/10th of the total. So again, some could be annuity and some cash value.
Now’s where it gets interesting and where you’re a genius. Let’s assume in the time traveler scenario there is one person who naturally got lucky and bought one winning chance which is what history records before we go back to change it. And then there’s me who arrives from the future and buys 10 chances knowing they’ll all win. Now there are 11 winning chances: their one and my 10. So each chance takes home 1/11 ~= 9.1% of the jackpot. And so that person wins ~9.1% and I win 10 * ~9.1 = ~91% of the total jackpot. Yaay me! Well, actually yaay you, since it was your idea.
Bottom line: My original concept behind my post was that, unlike lots of more complicated difficult or risky scenarios proposed by others, this was a way to suddenly acquire serious wealth in an utterly ordinary and unimpeachable way. Plenty of jackpots have been split two or more ways. You showing up a few months ago and buying an ordinary ticket with ordinary cash makes this real easy. You buying 10 chances with all the same number really bump the risk that somehow somebody someplace in their bureaucracy will foul up your plan. Taking just 50% of the winnings makes that interference pretty well impossible.
OTOH, as Groundhog Day teaches us, if somehow the buy-10-tickets plan fails and you end up in prison for lottery fraud, just go back and try it again until you / they get it right. If at first you don’t succeed, … CHEAT HARDER!!! 
Take some cash to your bank. Get rolls of nickels. Separate out the pre-1965 ones. This will take a few trips to get enough to be worthwhile. Go back to 1964, and swap the nickels for quarters, dimes, and half dollars. Come back to now and sell your silver coins for a large profit.
Of course, the easier way would be to show up to a gold rush site like Sutter’s mill a few years before anyone else and sneak out some gold. Just be sure to leave enough so the rush will still happen.
How far back would you need to go for it to be worth your while to buy some cheap postage stamps?
I think you misunderstood the meaning of the word and. That sentence means:
repeat in october '87 (aka: Black monday)
and
repeat again with the dot . com bubble.
Or at least that is what I wanted it to mean.