Would you rather have one billion dollars, or one penny doubled for each square on a chess board?
Easily take the $1 billion.
The pennies doubled on a chessboard would eventually turn out to a total... View MoreWould you rather have one billion dollars, or one penny doubled for each square on a chess board?
Easily take the $1 billion.
The pennies doubled on a chessboard would eventually turn out to a total of $184,467,440,737,095,000.00, or 184 Quadrillion, 467 Trillion, 440 Billion, 737 Million and 95 thousand dollars.
Great! You might say, that’s a lot more than $1Billion, but hold your horses. The total amount of money in the entire world right now (including unrealised investments, cryptocurrencies etc) is estimated as around $1.3 quadrillion, what do you think happens when you suddenly introduce 184 times that into the economy? You crash the entire world economy of course. The value of currencies will fall through the floor, people won’t be able to afford food, and when that happens, people get a bit, y’know, miffed at the people responsible.
And that’s not your only problem. You got that amount in pennies, not cash in the bank. There are 363,000 pennies in a ton, so what you have actually been handed is well over 500 Billion tons of pennies. To put this in perspective, the Great Wall of China weighs around 60 million tons, so that is around 8,333 Great Walls of China worth of metal that is about to get dumped on your front porch, or if you prefer your net worth to be weighed in units of natural wonders instead of man made ones, that would be 3 Mount Everests.
