Money is central to our never-ending search for a free lunch because it is a proxy for our most precious resources – time and energy.
What are the craziest ever money-making schemes? How about mining asteroids for precious metals, cornering the silver market or towing icebergs to release gold? We’ve pulled together some of the maddest money-making ideas.
Prize Linked Savings are a cross between a lottery and a savings account. The chance of a big Jackpot win and the guaranteed return of funds attract depositors but as with anything in life, PLS aren’t a free lunch.
Learn how the Great Recoinage and two of the nation’s greatest thinkers, John Locke and Isaac Newton, saved 17th-century England from running out of money due to coin clippers, counterfeiters & speculators.
The cult movies that popularised a unique form of computer fraud called salami slicing; stealing by tiny increments.
In 1974, the trust in the US Dollar was severely tested thanks to a bizarre conspiracy theory claiming that Fort Knox, the impregnable fortress storing much of America’s gold, was actually empty.
Unit bias within crypto conflates the price of tokens with their value. A low nominal price is considered cheap and attractive simply because you are able to buy more units of them. This leads to poor decision making.
In 1836, the Bank of England’s Directors received a taunting letter claiming access to its vaults. The events that followed, worthy of a Netflix documentary, involved a mysterious trunk and a trail leading through the bowels of London to an illiterate sewer hunter who might be the unsung OG of white hat hacking.
17th-century London had a thriving token economy with over 4,000 unique tokens circulating as a substitute for money, but it didn’t last. Most of them are buried in the muddy banks of the Thames, and their demise might give a clue as to the future of many of their 21st-century crypto token counterparts.
We have a special fascination with what are known as salami slicing scams, the theft of tiny amounts of money, often through computer systems, so small that they might go unnoticed but which can add up over time to significant sums. We’ve gathered together some of the best examples of salami slicing scams.
When coins were made of silver and gold, for some, the temptation to remove a slither was too great. Coin clipping was widespread despite carrying the death penalty.
