Let’s say that I invent time travel tomorrow and decide to take vacations in the recent past—say, the last hundred years or so. To survive for a long time in modern society, one needs money. But obviously I can’t use currency printed in the 21st century in the 20th century. Shops probably will refuse my money, and/or I will get arrested for counterfeiting. Therefore if I am travelling to the 1950s I need to have a supply of 1950s money.
Now, assume that I’m an ethical time traveller and don’t want to use modern technology to forge old currency. Let’s further assume that the time machine can transport paper and textiles, but has problems with valuables like diamonds and gold. Therefore I elect to take on my time journey a supply of authentic period banknotes. I’m going on a long trip to the American past and want to live reasonably well, so let’s say I need $10,000.
How easy would it be in 2006 to acquire $10,000 in 1996 banknotes? In 1986 banknotes? 1966? 1946? 1926? 1906? Who would I have to buy them from, and how much would they cost? Will a bank even give me notes from a few years ago (before the most recent design change) if I asked for them in quantity, or would that ring alarm bells? I know coin and bill collecting shops often have old bills in stock, but I’ve only ever seen them in individually wrapped plastic envelopes, never in quantity. Would I have to scrounge up invidual $100 bills from a hundred different shops and private collectors, or do people occasionally find long-lost boxes of old money and put the whole thing up for auction as a lot? Do coin collecting shops have “wholesale” dealers from whom they can order common specimens in bulk?
I cannot address all of your questions, but I will say that it is gonna be difficult.
At some point (I will not hazard a guess as to where) the collector value of the money is going to exceed the down-time value to that money.
However, since you do have a time machine, you could substitute work and time to get what you need. Get money dated 10 years ago, just keep going to the bank time after time, exchanging money…keep the earlier notes, exchange the rest. Go back a few more years, do same. Repeat as necessary.
Or, just go buy yourself a 100 dozen eggs, take them to the Klondike, exchange them for gold at $1.00 per egg, keep the gold eagles and double eagles ($5/$10/$20 gold pieces). Turn in the gold dust wherever, take your results to San Francisco and exchange that for more gold pieces. Then:
(1)Come back to 2006 and cash in those collector pieces and retire.
(2) Or, if you’re really bent on continually going into the past, repeat as necessary to get money that fits your particular era.
Wouldn’t a few lottery numbers and/or racing results be the most easily acquired valuables to take into the past?
As for the banknote problems, I understand central banks destroy the bank notes that they take out of circulation to replace them with new notes, so your source would probably be banknotes sold as collectors’ items (in unnecessarily good condition). Or you could tour the Third World and try to buy old dollar bills that people have stashed away as their savings…
This works only if it is relatively inexpensive to operate the time machine. If I start off with $30,000 and using the time machine burns up $10,000 worth of fuel, then with your scheme the furthest back I could go would be 1986. However, if I could purchase $10,000 in 1966 banknotes for $20,000, then I could go back to 1966.
I wrote that it’s not possible to take valuables through the time machine, so transporting gold coins won’t work. Anyway, that was really a plot device to get people to address the question of how to obtain obselete currency rather than speculate how to get rich using the time machine.
I might as well have said that I’m an eccentric multi-quintillionaire who wants to found an independent colony on Pluto, that the 1932 American dollar will be the colony’s official currency, and please how do I amass a collection of such banknotes so that I can start my new economy. Or that bio-archaeologists investigating a long-forgotten 1920s bank vault have discovered a hitherto-unknown species of bookworm whose only known food source is 1921 American banknotes. All attempts at feeding them substitutes have failed—perhaps they used something special in the ink or paper that year. In order to preserve this unique species until a substitute food source can be found, we need to find more 1921 banknotes.