The $220 mil password

[brevity]

I read the article, but it did not specify whether the hard drive's owner had a deadline to enter the correct password, or if he could just wait it out indefinitely with eight tries gone and two left to go. Because this seems like an occasion where one should wait for the invention of time travel.

I think I've mentioned this theory before, but if I wanted to know if time travel existed, and I had the financial means, I would offer a substantial monetary prize that could only be claimed by a someone who travels freely through time to collect the required information. Warren Buffett (secretly?) did this in March 2014 when he offered a Billion Dollar Bracket to pick all games in the NCAA Tournament correctly. (If you recall, this ended up being the year that 7 seed Connecticut beat 8 seed Kentucky in the final.)

No one claimed the prize, so therefore, time travel does not exist. Well, maybe. A time traveler with knowledge of the future could fill out a perfect bracket, but then what? Get paid $25 million a year for 40 years, or take the $500 million lump sum? There's no way to endure the verification process anonymously. At best you can hide behind legal representation, a nameless account, and probably a present-day person you appoint to grab all of the attention. Who to trust? It seems too complicated.

Though the dollar amount here of $220 million is (temporarily) lower, the Bitcoin prize is more appealing in its privacy and portability. This is a much better test of a time traveler's ethics. The owner should either wait for time travel to become available for him to retrieve the password himself, or sell the encrypted hard drive to the stranger carrying that familiar piece of paper bearing letters and numbers in the owner's handwriting.

[nmduke2001]

The original article from this thread is behind a firewall for me, but I think this is a different story. I first heard about this guy who threw away his hard drive a few years ago. The bitcoins on the hard drive are now worth $270 million. He's offered his municipality $70 million if they let him dig out the landfill.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/15/uk/bi...ntl/index.html

[OZZIE4DUKE]

About $2 each. $3 with the Power Play. That’s what it costs to play tonight’s Power Ball drawing for $550 million, $411 million cash option!

Original comments still apply, but the jackpots have gone up to $750M and $640M tonight and tomorrow nights.

[rsvman]

Original comments still apply, but the jackpots have gone up to $750M and $640M tonight and tomorrow nights.

It is nothing more than a tax on the mathematically challenged.

[Kdogg]

Man who accidentally threw out a bitcoin fortune offers $70 million for permission to dig it up

What kind of tech guys don't make backups of their stuff?

[YmoBeThere]

It is nothing more than a tax on the mathematically challenged.

At $2, is there no entertainment value?

[-jk]

It is nothing more than a tax on the mathematically challenged.

At $2, is there no entertainment value?

The late, great Doug Hinds liked to say the lottery is always a sucker's bet. When the jackpot beats the odds, though, it's an honest sucker's bet. (This was back when it was $1 ticket.)

-jk

[rsvman]

At $2, is there no entertainment value?

Not $2's worth. Not in my opinion.


If only the lottery could be graphically represented. For example, if there was a large plot ground covered with 176 million marbles (however much land it would take to lay out that many marbles in one layer would work).

Then people would be asked if they wanted to give a guy two bucks for the privilege of walking out somewhere into the vast field of marbles and choosing one of them at random, with the promise that they would be awarded vast sums of money if, and only if, they picked the ONE marble among those 176 million that they had specified ahead of time was valuable. It looks exactly like all the others, though.

I really think that if people could actually SEE and therefore at least somewhat visualize what the odds were, most people would decline.



I thought of this a number of years ago. At a 7-11 near my hospital there is a near-constant parade of people, who, by the looks of things, can probably scarcely afford to throw away money, going into the 7-11 and paying two bucks for a lottery ticket. They get nothing in return. So, here was my idea. I could go there and offer them one dollar for their two dollars. After all, a buck is better than nothing, right? By so doing I would cut their losses in half, giving them a better chance to be able to make ends meet. At the same time, I would earn a 100% return. It's a win-win!

[Skydog]

Many, many years ago a work colleague would go around my office on Fridays collecting $ for Powerball or MegaMillion tickets or whatever they were called then. Almost all chipped in a buck but not me - I knew it was a suckers bet. I just said no, over and over and over. But as the months wore and he kept coming by I couldn't always keep my tired Friday afternoon brain from wandering into that bad what if they did win?? place. These were my buddies but they would all quit and for the next couple of decades I alone of our group would still have to trudge into my office every work day, every hour of the day thinking "what if?" Yes, we would get new hires -- newbies who would whisper behind my back "yeah, he was the only one who refused to put in a dollar, poor thing." So I finally said heck with the rational life, gave in and started pitching in my once-a-week dollar.

I didn't do it in hopes of winning. I was just buying a dollars worth of peace of mind, an insurance policy against an extremely unlikely but also extremely depressing event! I also knew it was a completely irrational fear but... again, it was only a dollar.

Epilogue - We all got tired of it and quit buying tickets a couple months later. That ended up being ~$8 I'll never see again!