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)
Don’t mess with a genius (2010) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37501231 - Sept 2023 (49 comments)
I'm surprised there's not a movie out based on this story
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
Shameless plug: if you like my writing, I mostly write about AI these days: https://www.ignorance.ai/
> 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?
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.)
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...
I listened to the podcast version of this Damn Interesting post: https://www.damninteresting.com/devouring-the-heart-of-portu...
"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.
No it wouldn't. Probably an off by factor of 1000 error.
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.
> [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...
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".
_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}