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.
Hold your nose, put down your sandwich and meet an army of Sewer Hunters dredging the drains of Victorian-era London for treasure.
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.
Variations on cleromancy, the drawing of lots, have been used in fascinating ways across all cultures, including life and death situations like the euphemistically termed ‘custom of the sea’ and could even provide a fair system of future governance.
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.
Survivorship bias explains why big Lottery wins are always accompanied by an image of the ecstatic winners popping champagne and gripping a giant oversized cheque. The salient image encourages us to focus on the outcome – the smiling winner- and ignore the process – millions of losing tickets. Understanding survivorship can help you make better decisions, and there’s no better place to start learning than the Mountain of Hell Downhill Bike Race.
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.
Read the amazing story of Stefan Mandel, a Romanian economist who used elementary maths to win 14 lotteries worldwide.
