Rather than hijacking the discussion of storing documents to make a fortune, what other methods can be used to make money with a time-machine?
My current best thought is go back to 2009, mine a couple of hundred bitcoins, bring the wallet back with you, and Bob’s your uncle.
This has an advantage in that it works in both branching and non-branching time-machines. Lost bitcoins are a thing, and popping up with the password to a long dormant account shouldn’t raise many (if any) eyebrows.
Compare this to somehow setting up a way to buy Apple stock at the IPO and passing control of the shares to future you, or giving yourself the multi-centi-million Powerball numbers (which wasn’t won in your current timeline).
Though you’d have to make sure those Bitcoin hadnt been mined in this reality. Not sure how hard the algorithm would be to mine Bitcoin in 2010 but only Bitcoin that hadn’t been mined in 2025. Presumably that’s just as hard as mining those Bitcoin in 2025?
The classic Back to the Future sports almanac route seems like best… well bet. Though in practice what’s the limit to how much sports betting companies will actually pay out? Or even take a bet on. Like it’s pretty trivial to come up with a combination of bets that will win billions or trillions of dollars. Would they take that bet? Would they pay out if you win?
The problem here is that nobody is thinking fourth dimensionally. What you need to do is to establish a wormhole that goes to the recent past with adjacent portals. (You can do this by taking one of the termini out into space and dragging it around the solar system at relativistic speeds until you get the desired temporal separation. You toss in a bag of gold bullion. (I recommend coins for fungibility). When the bullion comes out the ‘past’ terminus, you toss it back into the ‘future’ terminus. Keep doing this over and over again until you’ve compounded sufficient wealth to cover your debts and the live the life of a king, then jump through the wormhole yourself and pack all of the bags and run away before your future self shows back up to collect the bags.
Your future self will be bankrupted, of course, by the loss of bullion and saddled the unimaginable costs to build this wormhole, but like the ‘other Marty’ that’s really his problem to be conveniently ignored by loudly playing a pop song over the closing credits.
How are you transferring that wealth back to the future?
But as talked about at length there, how are you storing the card so it is appropriately aged and you have access to it now? I’m hoping to make this fairly easy on myself.
My understanding is that each Bitcoin gets harder to mine - so if I bring a state-of-the-art GPU based mining rig back 16 years, I should be able to make them pretty quickly.
As to duplicates - if I’m in a universe where I can’t change the past, then I’ve already mined those coins, and I’m more-or-less just retrieving the wallet. If I’m in a multi-branching, multiverse universe, then my creating those coins causes a branch and I’m still good.
Someone turned $10 into $30K on a 13-leg parlay, So I think you could push that pretty hard, as long as you only did it a couple of times at each sports book, probably on different sports. At some pretty early point they are going to ban you, but I think you’d get your payouts.
If that’s the case then Bitcoin is a winner. No need to bring a 2025 GPU, just mine the easily mined 2010 coins with a 2010 GPU. Email the keys to yourself (at email address you know will survive for 15 years), and you’re a billionaire.
The largest Powerball jackpot was 2.04 billion, won on November 7th, 2022. Just travel back to the day of the previous drawing, place the bet, and be the sole winner.
Unlike other rare documents, the collectors of. Baseball cards are obsessive about looking for pristine versions that have no signs of aging. Plus, these cards were produced in the 20th century. So having a mint condition card, with the explanation that it was hermetically sealed since it was issued, is plausible and, ironically, would enhance its value.
Are you talking about traveling both forward and backward in time, or just backward?
If you can travel forward you can figure out what stocks to bet on, what crypto to invest in, what sports to bet on (a la back to the future) and then go back to the present and bet your money on those things.
If you go back in time, just do the same thing. Go to your past self, or someone in your past who you think would believe you and tell them to invest in whatever (microsoft, amazon, facebook, bitcoin, nvidia, real estate in california, etc) long before the spike, then when you get back to the present, split the money with them.
As others have said, a couple hundred years ago pure aluminum was worth more than gold. Maybe barter that for gold and bring the gold back. Or just bury the gold somewhere nobody will find it while you’re in the past, then dig it up in the present.
Another thing you can do is bring ideas from the present into the past. If you can bring a modern cell phone into the past, and build a corporation around its technology, that company would be worth trillions.
Though that will require some financial and/or timeline shenanigans. What do you do with the money? Do you create an account as 2025 you? What documents do you use? They are not going to cash a 2 billion dollar check into anything but a completely above board totally verified bank account, fully documented as belonging to you.
Or do you get 2022 you to do it? Is meeting yourself allowed by the time travel rules of your universe? Would that actually change the future you will travel back to? As in your timeline you didn’t meet your future self in 2022 and get told the powerball numbers.
Bitcoin seems a safer bet. No regulation. All you need are the keys for those 2010 Bitcoin and you’re laughing.
A cell phone is not a good example. If an engineering company in, say, 1960, had a modern cell phone, they would be unable to reproduce it because of the lack of manufacturing infrastructure to produce such miniaturized components. The obstacle is not the ideas behind the cell phone, most of which were already understood in 1960, it’s the ability to manufacture it. Going farther back would make the manufacturing issue even worse.
That might be true in theory. But was anyone actually buying aluminum 200 years ago in practice. Other than than a handful of metalurgists would anyone even know what it was let alone be willing to hand over a pile of bullion for it?
It depends on how far back you go. What if you took a duffel bag full of modern smartphones back to 2005, engineers may be able to build a company around some of the technology they find in them.
I’ve wondered this same question and I’ve wondered what is the absolute maximum amount of Bitcoin a person (if given foresight) could have obtained in 2009-2013. Could he have gotten 50,000 or more bitcoins? And if he did, would that butterfly-effect things in such a way that bitcoin might not be worth $100,000 per bitcoin today?
Yeah, Folacin, are you sure you have understood how time machines work?
Step 1(?): Toss bunch of that gold bullion into that wormhole. Apparently, you have plenty.
Step 1(??): Grab the gold bullion conveniently coming out the wormhole.
Maybe we already have some time travelers? In this article, 10,000 bitcoins from accounts that hadn’t been accessed since 2011 were suddenly moved to another account. The original price was around $7800, and in July, when the move was made, were worth about $2 billion.
There are lots of inactive bitcoin accounts. Having 10,000 or 50,000 coins dormant would be unlikely to be worth much notice. The accounts suddenly waking up would be noticed, and selling them all at once would likely crash the price of bitcoin.
Due to the nature of bitcoin, the movement and sale of the bitcoins is known, but who owns them is not. That falls down when converting from the bitcoins into other assets. Feds can’t subpoena the blockchain ledger, but they can subpoena a bank to find the owner of an account.
Anyway, this does seem like a good method for a time traveler to make money, because the only thing that has to move forward in time is information—the private key to the wallet.
