The Greatest Counterfeiter (2021)
guo.ioAwesome 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)
Related ongoing thread:
Don’t mess with a genius (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37501231 - Sept 2023 (49 comments)
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
I would watch the heck out of this Netflix series. Way better than Sherlock Holmes.
So where would Satoshi Nakamoto sit in the scheme of things considering the total value of crypto currency?
Inventing a financial system that is voluntarily adopted internationally is not counterfeiting. In fact, Satoshi invented the first currency impossible to counterfeit (barring 51% attack).
Anything 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
Presumably a "-$1" with many zeroes behind it.
My 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
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/
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!
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?
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.
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.)
Coins are a weird one because I don’t think any of the ones in common circulation are worth significantly more than melt value.
Yeah, 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://www.goldavenue.com/en/blog/newsletter-precious-metal...
https://page-one.springer.com/pdf/preview/10.1057/9780230118...
Greatest counterfeiter... we know of!
Terrific book: The Man Who Stole Portugal by Murray Bloom. Tells the details and how he did it. Fun read!
This is a wonderful story!
I listened to the podcast version of this Damn Interesting post: https://www.damninteresting.com/devouring-the-heart-of-portu...
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.
I wonder how many people knew all along what was going on there but couldn't get anyone to care?
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
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!
"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.
I 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.
I 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.
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).
According 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
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Counterfeit_500_escudo_no...
_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){kind=link}
That's wild! Feels similar to some of the crypto scams going around wrt stable coins.
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".