Fun thought experiment

[ZiyaadD]

Suppose you were to grab your current PC build and you were to jump in a time machine. What is the latest year would you go to and be able to announce to the people that you own the most advanced computer on the planet?

 

Personally, I would go to the year 2005. I have a ryzen 5 2600x and a GTX 750 ti, 

[SupaKomputa]

I would donate the soviet my pc in the space race era, so they will beat USA reaching the moon.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

Go to 1988

Fire up a nes emulator

Tell people I made the best nes emulator.

[WhitetailAni]

2008 or so.

CPU I'll be miles ahead for a decent bit, but GPU is sorely lacking.

[CerealExperimentsLain]

51 minutes ago, HelpfulTechWizard said:

Go to 1988

Fire up a nes emulator

Tell people I made the best nes emulator.

"So it's an Nintendo, but bigger, more expensive, uses a lot more electricity?"
"But it uses run-ahead for near zero lag!"
"So can my Nintendo from Toys R' Us..."
"Ugh, fine.. BEHOLD, PLAYSTATION 1 EMULATION!"
"HOLY COW IT'S LIKE THAT DIRE STRAIGHTS MUSIC VIDEO, WHY DIDN'T YOU LEAD WITH THIS?"

[mariushm]

22 minutes ago, Sakuriru said:

Step 1: go back in time
Step 2: mine bitcoin

Why bother.

As long as you go back in time, just go and buy some stocks before the dot com crash and sell them before the crash to become a millionaire.

Then just give a message to Vitalik and buy 500k ETH from him for $0.99 each : https://blockchain.news/news/mike-novogratz-500-000-ethereum-vitalik-buterin-2015

Hard to beat 4000+ times your investment in 6 years.

[mariushm]

9 hours ago, Sakuriru said:

Because doing that requires putting that money into a bank account which you may not already possess, or carefully sorting cash from the past so that it's old enough to be used in the era you're going to. Honestly it's a messy solution.

 

With bitcoin mining you go back in time once, mine a ton of coins, and then all you need to take back to the future with you is your wallet. You can cash out in your present time into your present bank account without making a mess of things by duplicating cash, leaving cash from the future in the past, or risking a paradox. Your time travel will be completely untraceable.

Well, you see, the problem you'll have is that every thing you do will affect the future.

 

For example, you start bitcoin mining right at the start when the mining difficulty is very low.  You still need money for computers and video cards to accelerate mining - I just put the money in stocks and sell the stocks before the market crashes instead of buying hardware - and then you start mining and as you mine, the difficulty increases and it's getting harder and harder for everyone to mine.

 

Now, your action may cause a chain reaction: the people that learn about Bitcoin may try to mine and instead of keeping up and mining and becoming rich, they give up because the difficulty is already too high (because you mined a lot already and raised the difficulty) so now all those thousands of geeks mining and promoting the coin may no longer be there, leaving just the big mining farms.

You won't have people buying pizza for a couple of bitcoin, you won't have as much word of mouth, you won't have as much popularity ... you may even do so bad as to discourage other groups from creating other crypto coins and that could slow down bitcoin and crypto coins in general so your bitcoin would not value as much.

 

So your action may cause the price of Bitcoin to be significantly different in your new future, because people may no longer trust it, if the majority of bitcoin is owned by mining farms and you, and if it takes specialized hardware to even mine.

 

My approach was simple ... invest in some stocks that you know are gonna go up hundreds of times right before the market crashes in the dot com bubble. You have investment funds and banks pushing money into stocks, so you're not gonna hurt any individual person by dumping stocks at high price right before the crash and getting rich. You're either gonna hurt a bank, or you're gonna hurt an investment fund that handles money of thousands to millions of people - and those funds would still go bankrupt or lose money even without your influence.  You make a few millions and everyone around you loses billions ... your millions are a drop in the proverbial bucket.

 

As for needing funds ... you could start with a few hundred dollars, which you could make working at McDonalds for a couple of weeks or somewhere else.

You could also memorize the winning numbers of some lottery games and win the 2nd or 3rd best price, not the jackpot ... the next thing where you may have 1000 winners each with 5-10k or something like that.  Chances are you taking one person's place in that pool of winners, or diluting the winning of those 1000 winners by a few hundred dollars won't influence their lives by a significant amount... and in theory less damage than you'd do by mining bitcoin.

 

Buying 500k eth straight from vitalik would not influence the eth price, as those weren't mined and would not increase mining difficulty .... so instead of one millionaire holding the eth and slowly selling it, I'm buying the eth instead.

 

[LogicalDrm]

On 5/11/2021 at 8:22 PM, ZiyaadD said:

Personally, I would go to the year 2005. I have a ryzen 5 2600x and a GTX 750 ti, 

I don't quite understand your premise here. Do you mean year prior to your oldest something? Which can't really be case or anything that remains particularly unchanged over the years. And if this is it, isn't 2005 bit too much back? Your CPU is from 2018 and GPU from 2014.

[airborne spoon]

i guess 2018? i dono when my card came out but a year or so prior to its release date it would be pretty hot shit, i got a 5900x and a RX 5700XT all on water.

[Kisai]

On 5/11/2021 at 10:22 AM, ZiyaadD said:

Suppose you were to grab your current PC build and you were to jump in a time machine. What is the latest year would you go to and be able to announce to the people that you own the most advanced computer on the planet?

 

Personally, I would go to the year 2005. I have a ryzen 5 2600x and a GTX 750 ti, 

No current desktop is more powerful than much older super computers. Like my Haswell CPU has around 182 Gflops (linpack), and the closest supercomputer to that would be from 1994 Numerical Wind Tunnel .

 

So that's a 20 year gap, depending how you want to frame it. However you run into a few obstacles with this scenario.

- Even though you could technically connect a PC from today to the internet in 1994, you likely wouldn't be able to do much unless you had access to a university network.

- A PC from today does not run 16-bit DOS software, let alone 16-bit Windows software, you'd only be able to run software written for NT4, which came out in 1996. Never mind Linux wouldn't have optimizations for anything newer than a Pentium III.

 

So even though yes, a new machine might be more powerful, some of that is from new instructions and optimizations. It would be unlikely you could be prepared enough to bring software from 2021 to 1994 to recompile 1994 applications to make your laptop/desktop run software as well as a super computer from the era.

 

That's one of the large oversights about time travel thought experiments, usually they require a super-narrow focus, otherwise you get into "what if" problems. Like consider the pandemic right now, if you went into a time machine, you'd be taking the pandemic with you. Never mind taking various other diseases we have immunity for back in time when there is no immunity for it.

 

So if you brought back a computer from the future, did you bring back spare parts? Like batteries, SSD's or Power Supplies? Like there are only two connectors on a current PC that are still the same as a legacy PC, the AC power and the Ethernet port. Everything else has been replaced with USB. Did you remember to bring adaptors for VGA monitors? Does the OS on the future desktop support 640x480x60hz analog monitors?

 

[spartaman64]

what do you mean by advanced? most advanced architecture? then you'd only have to go back to before the gpu or cpu was produced. my 3080 was launched September 2020 and probably i was in production for a few months before that so lets say January 2020 to be safe.

if you mean the fastest computer its apparently around 2000 and 2001

[LogicalDrm]

Actually, anyone of us could go back to late-90s, to time when laptops required constantly be plugged into wall and had ball mice, and show any tablet or phone.

[mariushm]

@LogicalDrm

 

There was a short series called Journeyman where a guy and a woman randomly travel through time at various points in the life of a person (different person each episode) to nudge them in a different direction until that person is on a particular path the universe wants them I guess...  quite interesting and cool series, shame it didn't last for more seasons.

 

Wasn't much of a jump in the past, only 20-30 years, but he still had to be careful to wear plain clothes and not carry bluetooth on his ear or other stuff from the future on him, and he also had to buy an old Nokia phone because at some point GSM standards changed in US and the modern iphone could not connector to networks in the past, 10-30 years ago.

In one particular episode he was shot right before he jumped in the past a decade or so and the hospital only get him a shot of penicillin which could not kill the modern bacteria from the present, and he almost died... he was lucky he jumped back in the future and got to another hospital to get better antibiotics, otherwise he would have died.

 

Some people from past saw his iphone at some point and the woman friend had to lie and say it was a toy calculator and distract the people and hide the phone

[DoctorNick]

Go back to 2013, mine dogecoin. Oh wait I already did that 

[LogicalDrm]

6 minutes ago, mariushm said:

@LogicalDrm

 

There was a short series called Journeyman where a guy and a woman randomly travel through time at various points in the life of a person (different person each episode) to nudge them in a different direction until that person is on a particular path the universe wants them I guess...  quite interesting and cool series, shame it didn't last for more seasons.

 

Wasn't much of a jump in the past, only 20-30 years, but he still had to be careful to wear plain clothes and not carry bluetooth on his ear or other stuff from the future on him, and he also had to buy an old Nokia phone because at some point GSM standards changed in US and the modern iphone could not connector to networks in the past, 10-30 years ago.

In one particular episode he was shot right before he jumped in the past a decade or so and the hospital only get him a shot of penicillin which could not kill the modern bacteria from the present, and he almost died... he was lucky he jumped back in the future and got to another hospital to get better antibiotics, otherwise he would have died.

 

Some people from past saw his iphone at some point and the woman friend had to lie and say it was a toy calculator and distract the people and hide the phone

Missing the whole point of this topic? And I thought I didn't understand the premise.

[Mling]

Goes back in time to get a massive e-weiner

 

Finds e-weiner in the 90s doesnt get you laid.

 

Gets girl friend stolen by 90s surfer bro.

[Spindel]

I would go to 2019

 

I have a M1 Mini.