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The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)
- matanyall 3y agoThat's wild! Feels similar to some of the crypto scams going around wrt stable coins.
- nullc 3y agoThere is a conman who tried claiming to by Bitcoin's creator that got laughed off the stage when his 'proof' turned out to be fake. He went on to create his own Bitcoin clone, and now financed by ex-DHS-most-wanted Antiguan ambassador is now trying to substitute the clone for the real thing through a series of lawsuits and by trying to destroy the real thing by suing for billions of dolllars any open source developer who dare volunteer to work on the software. I'm not sure if "I'll buy the bank to make my fraud legit" is more ballsy than "I'll (ab)use the courts to carry out my fraud in full view of the public, content that no one will stop me because no one has stopped me yet and sensible people will avoid making themselves my targets".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- svat 3y agoAwesome story! And all this before 28… Though not a contender for “greatest counterfeiter”, there is also William Chaloner (1650–1699), who had a similar idea (“the safest place from which to pass his money was the Mint itself”), and did battle with Sir Isaac Newton. There's a great book about this called Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World’s Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson; I wrote a blog post about it some years ago, with the subtitle “What happens when Newton’s laws are violated”: https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/dont-mess-with-a-genius/ https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/dont-mess-with-a... (aside: the free wordpress.com hosting injects lots of ads these days sadly)
- 123pie123 3y agowow fantastic read, as good if not better then the main story(because it's bloody Isaac Newton doing this!! ) I'm surprised there's not a movie out based on this story
- more_corn 3y agoI would watch the heck out of this Netflix series. Way better than Sherlock Holmes.
- darkclouds 3y agoSo where would Satoshi Nakamoto sit in the scheme of things considering the total value of crypto currency?
- block_dagger 3y agoInventing a financial system that is voluntarily adopted internationally is not counterfeiting. In fact, Satoshi invented the first currency impossible to counterfeit (barring 51% attack).
- darkclouds 3y agoAnything man made can be counterfeited, and ultimately the threat of violence is what deters those that have the resources to counterfeit. The philosophy of Injin, The Man, The Legend
- flangola7 3y agoPresumably a "-$1" with many zeroes behind it.
- dang 3y agoRelated ongoing thread: Don’t mess with a genius (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37501231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37501231 - Sept 2023 (49 comments)
- Nifty3929 3y agoCovered briefly in an entertaining book called "Lying for Money" which is all about various forms of fraud and how they work, with real life examples as demonstrations. It's a very entertaining read!
- m3kw9 3y agothis story could be used to teach some macroeconomics lessons. There’s direct stimulus causing a boom(bills printed) because they spend it so fast, lending at 0 interest, and how directly a countries faith in their money can cause a devaluation
- charlierguo 3y agoOh wow, crazy to see this on the front page! Author here. Shameless plug: if you like my writing, I mostly write about AI these days: https://www.ignorance.ai/ https://www.ignorance.ai/
- chankstein38 3y agoThis was a great post! I don't normally read entire blog posts on here because frequently people are too verbose and the meat is sparse so I skim but this one I read word for word and I really enjoyed it! Thank you!
- mdp2021 3y agoGreat! > mostly It seems like all of your writing is devoted to AI these days, if we only count guo.io and ignorance.ai . Do you use other spaces?
- charlierguo 3y agoTexts, emails, love letters. I work for a company that's got nothing to do with AI and I write some internal content, but not much that's designed for public consumption.
- at-fates-hands 3y agoOne of the best lines from the story: "These four made it rain so hard it created a noticeable boom in the Portuguese economy." Which highlights to issue with counterfeit money - its pretty easy to create, but then the hard part is laundering it. The whole story is just staggering to think they got away with it for so long.
- gumby 3y agoThe photos in the article appear to be of legit notes, as I searched for the word "Angola" without success (they were able to explain away the fraud to the printer by pointing this out).
- stordoff 3y agoAccording to Wikipedia[1], "Angola" was (allegedly) to be printed on the notes later: > [T]he contract had specified that the word "Angola" would be overprinted on the new notes when they reached Lisbon and before transport to Angola (they were allegedly for colonial circulation only) The article has an image[2] taken at the British Museum showing a real and counterfeit note, both with the same serial number. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alves_dos_Reis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alves_dos_Reis [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Counterfeit_500_escudo_note_(upper)_and_a_genuine_banknote_(lower)_of_Banco_de_Portugal._Both_carry_the_same_serial_number_of_1K_02201,_1922._On_display_at_the_British_Museum_in_London.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Counterfeit_500_escudo_no...
- thisisauserid 3y agoGreatest counterfeiter... we know of!
- sam_goody 3y agoThe Israeli one shekel coin was counterfeited so much that it was more common than the real coin. When they caught the counterfeiter, he was let off on a technicality (his coins were not an exact copy - they were missing a dot, and they were not magnetic while the real coin was), but the coins were so common they were accepted as legal tender. (At the time people said that the counterfeiter was fined so much he had to keep the presses running all night.)
- TylerE 3y agoCoins are a weird one because I don’t think any of the ones in common circulation are worth significantly more than melt value.
- EdwardDiego 3y agoYeah, but then look at all the oddities that occurred when they were made of precious metals, and the resulting economic impacts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_coin_debasement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methods_of_coin_debasement https://www.goldavenue.com/en/blog/newsletter-precious-metals-spotlight/the-great-denarius-debasement https://www.goldavenue.com/en/blog/newsletter-precious-metal... https://page-one.springer.com/pdf/preview/10.1057/9780230118249_4 https://page-one.springer.com/pdf/preview/10.1057/9780230118...
- nullc 3y agoI wonder how many people knew all along what was going on there but couldn't get anyone to care?
- gweinberg 3y ago"How much money did they print? 100 million escudos, which at the time was 0.88% of Portugal’s GDP. Today, it would be worth 150 billion dollars." No it wouldn't. Probably an off by factor of 1000 error.
- vijayr02 3y agoI had the same thought: .88% of today's Portugal GDP is only 2 billion USD. But in retrospect, it looks like the comparison is being done to the US economy, given the readership. 150 billion USD is approximately .8% of US GDP. Should have been better explained, I agree.
- bmacho 3y agoI can accept 150 billion without any suspicion. Portugal just needed to have 75 times greater influence/more value back then in the known economy, than today. Sounds about right.
- CliffStoll 3y agoTerrific book: The Man Who Stole Portugal by Murray Bloom. Tells the details and how he did it. Fun read!
- john-tells-all 3y agoThis is a wonderful story! I listened to the podcast version of this Damn Interesting post: https://www.damninteresting.com/devouring-the-heart-of-portugal/ https://www.damninteresting.com/devouring-the-heart-of-portu...
- WalterBright 3y agoMy favorite story is that of Jose Beraha Zdravko. He counterfeited the British gold sovereign, and his genius was putting more gold in them than the originals. His "Beraha Sovereigns" fetched a higher price than the official sovereign, more than the value of the extra gold. Tired of this humiliation, the British tried him for counterfeiting. He countered that only legal tender could be counterfeited, and sovereigns were no longer legal tender. He won the case. "Money of their Own" by Murray Teigh Bloom