The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)
1–10 of 32 posts
Re: The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)
#2That's wild! Feels similar to some of the crypto scams going around wrt stable coins.
Re: The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)
#3Awesome 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)
Re: The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)
#4Covered 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!
Re: The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)
#5this 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
Re: The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)
#6Oh 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/
Re: The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)
#7One 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.
Re: The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)
#8Oh 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/
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!
Re: The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)
#9The 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).
Re: The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)
#10Awesome 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;…
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