[HN Gopher] The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)
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The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)
Author : AlexeyMK
Score : 64 points
Date : 2023-09-13 00:34 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.guo.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.guo.io)
| charlierguo wrote:
| Oh 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/
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Great!
|
| > _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 wrote:
| Texts, 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.
| chankstein38 wrote:
| This 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!
| thisisauserid wrote:
| Greatest counterfeiter... we know of!
| svat wrote:
| Awesome 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...
| (aside: the free wordpress.com hosting injects lots of ads these
| days sadly)
| 123pie123 wrote:
| wow 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
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| One 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 wrote:
| The 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).
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| Covered 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!
| sam_goody wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| Coins are a weird one because I don't think any of the ones in
| common circulation are worth significantly more than melt
| value.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| this 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
| matanyall wrote:
| That's wild! Feels similar to some of the crypto scams going
| around wrt stable coins.
| nullc wrote:
| There 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".
| nullc wrote:
| I wonder how many people knew all along what was going on there
| but couldn't get anyone to care?
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(page generated 2023-09-13 23:01 UTC)