Turning my future generations into Trillionaires

Malthusian

bostonerimus wrote: »

This assumes that time is linear and only goes in one direction. Of course for Milliways to work compound interest would have to break T-symmetry,

T-symmetry is over my head, but what I do understand is that money as we know it cannot exist if you can send money backwards and forwards through time. Otherwise you would send all your money back to the earliest point where a financial market existed that allowed your money to retain a continuous ownership to the present, have it invested there, then reap a billion-dollar fortune in the present.

Naturally this would cause money to become worthless because of the supply of money being poured in from the future. As there would be no point sending money back to this time T to be invested because there would be no economy to invest in thanks to time-travelling helicopter money (Tardis money?) causing hyperinflation, investors would instead send their money back to time T+1, which would cause the economy of T+1 to collapse, and so on which means the entire concept of time-travelling money collapses. In a universe in which controlled time travel is possible, then either money does not exist or money does exist but can't travel through time.

What would probably actually happen is that if you existed in a universe where the Fermi paradox of time travel didn't apply and you found that investors were attempting to send currency into your time for the future - in whatever form - then the courts would declare ownership of those assets legally void. Any contracts would be voided and any physical assets would become property of the Crown or equivalent. This legal mechanism would be very similar to the law of perpetuities. Just as you can't assert ownership of goods decades after your death, you wouldn't be able to assert ownership of goods decades before your birth either. This would then allow a stable universe in which people don't destroy economies by flooding them with money from the future.

In a variant of the Fermi paradox, we know you can't send money back and forth in the universe of Hitchhiker's because the galaxy has a working financial market. Time travel is heavily restricted - exactly how is not clear from the canon, but note that all the time travel in the books took place as a result of accidents. (A computer or the Heart of Gold exploding to send everyone to Milliways, the random anomaly that rescues Arthur and Ford from prehistoric Earth.)

My pet theory is that Milliways obtains its food and drink by looting it from the collapsing end-of-days galactic civilisation, then sending it forward in time. (If you can send patrons forward in time to the restaurant you can send other organic matter.) The point of telling customers to put a penny in a deposit account in their own time is to stop them wondering where it actually got its supplies from. If Milliways is maintained by violent warlordism it has no need for compound interest.

bostonerimus

Malthusian wrote: »

T-symmetry is over my head, but what I do understand is that money as we know it cannot exist if you can send money backwards and forwards through time. Otherwise you would send all your money back to the earliest point where a financial market existed that allowed your money to retain a continuous ownership to the present, have it invested there, then reap a billion-dollar fortune in the present.

.

I think you've nicely explained why compound interest cannot break T-symmetry so it's not "over your head " at all. The way to profit from time travel is to use present day money and apply future knowledge ie Biff's Sports Almanac ruse in Back to the Future or shorting the market in 2007.

Ash_Pole

Making wealth last through the centuries is very possible.

Humphrey Booth the Elder was a wealthy merchant from Salford, when he died he left some land in Manchester the income from which was to be used in perpetuity for the alleviation of poverty in Salford. Nearly 500 years later the charitable trust is still going very strong.

Land is where the OP wants to put their money. Mind you, a fair bit more than 15-20k is probably needed

Malthusian

Ash_Pole wrote: »

Making wealth last through the centuries is very possible.

Humphrey Booth the Elder was a wealthy merchant from Salford, when he died he left some land in Manchester the income from which was to be used in perpetuity for the alleviation of poverty in Salford. Nearly 500 years later the charitable trust is still going very strong.

The difference here is that the money in Booth's trust was to be used to alleviate poverty immediately after his death, and the year after that, and the year after that. At any point in time it was being used to alleviate poverty. Thanks to good management it has been alleviating poverty continuously for 500 years.

What the OP was asking about is whether you can get your children, or other trustees of their generation, to do nothing at all with the money (other than passively invest it) for the benefit of a distant generation.

The charitable equivalent would have been if Booth stated in his Will that the money in his estate was to be invested for 500 years and only then taken out and used to alleviate poverty in Salford in the 21st century, assuming that the Second Coming hadn't happened and poverty still existed in Salford. This would have failed.

How many 500-year-old charities are still in existence, and how many charities founded in the last 500 years were wound up after they become uneconomic to run, or became obsolete (e.g. a trust to preserve a playing field for the sole use of the kick-the-Saracen's-head team), or one of the trustees took the money and fled to the Bahamas?

It is certainly possible to make wealth last through the centuries but it's impossible for you personally to make wealth last through the centuries. It is only possible through a joint effort of you and all the trustees that come after you. It wasn't Booth who ensured that his trust would still be going 500 years later, but all the trustees of his charity that came after.

bostonerimus wrote:

The way to profit from time travel is to use present day money and apply future knowledge ie Biff's Sports Almanac ruse in Back to the Future or shorting the market in 2007.

True. But for obvious reasons this only works if you are the only time traveller in your particular universe, or one of a very restricted number. If information is travelling freely from the future it gets incorporated into the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Or the Ultra-Efficient Market Hypothesis.

(The Efficient Market Hypothesis states that a stockmarket incorporates all available information into the market price instantaneously. The Ultra-Efficient Market Hypothesis states that bookmakers incorporate all available information into the odds even faster.)

easterbunni

bostonerimus wrote: »

If you put one penny in an interest bearing account then by the time the Universe ends you'll be able to pay for your fantastically expensive meal at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Unless you leave the bathroom light on and leave Earth for 3 million years

londoninvestor

iglad wrote: »

Also it was an educational trust set up by Kate Middleton's ancestor (a wealthy Yorkshire industrialist) that allowed her to receive a private education and then onto University where she met Andrew so her social mobility was all down to education and that fore-sighted ancestor.

Was it at St William's university that she met Andrew?