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Comment by jackcosgrove | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if anyone has run the numbers and looked at what the interest payments of this bond over the past 400 years would have amounted to had they been invested in some theoretical basket of typical assets that were available at the time.

It sounds like a pittance now but 400 years of a compounding pittance could be a lot of money.

Edit: with an annual contribution of €13.61 and a real rate of return of 3%, 400 years of annual compounding would be over €7 million. With a rate of 4% it would be €280 million.

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> with an annual contribution of €13.61 and a real rate of return of 3%, 400 years of annual compounding would be over €7 million. With a rate of 4% it would be €280 million

400 years -> 280M

That gives you a perspective on how insane a billion dollars is. Also wild that any single individual can own that much (and some a lot more!)

> Also wild that any single individual can own that much (and some a lot more!)

Nobody owns a billion dollars except governments.

"Billionaires" usually have ownership of business interests that could theoretically be sold for a billion dollars, but that they generally do not want to sell (because they would rather own and often run the business.).

Why sell when you can take out loans against your stock holdings?

LOL Bezos sold a few Bs of Amazon every other week recently. I’m sure all the top billionaires could get a billion in cash easily if they ever need to.

The issue would be finding an asset (or group of assets) that 1) held value and 2) you could maintain ownership over continuously for 400 years. Cities, kingdoms, countries, currencies, corporations, banks, markets all rise and go extinct over much shorter periods.

Monetary calculations in general are tough over that long of a timespan in general much less when you have to factor in the likelihood your theoretical investment would have survived the bakers dozen of financial/governmental crises.

> with an annual contribution of €13.61 and a real rate of return of 3%, 400 years of annual compounding would be over €7 million. With a rate of 4% it would be €280 million.

Calculating the total return given an annual average rate of return is the easy part here. The idea that you can easily invest in a diversified basket of assets and receive a fairly safe x% a year is a relatively recent one. I'm not sure what assets you could invest in 400 years that would even be guaranteed to exist today.

The Hudson's Bay Company is almost old enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson%27s_Bay_Company

Japanese construction firms

> with an annual contribution of €13.61 and a real rate of return of 3%, 400 years of annual compounding would be over €7 million. With a rate of 4% it would be €280 million.

Reminds of Futurama with billionaire Philip J Fry after unintentionally leaving 93 cents in the bank for 1000 years.

I asked a bot to do the math for me (if anyone was as curious as I was):

93 cents would turn into approximately $17.88 trillion with compound interest of 3% over 1000 years.

93 cents would turn into approximately $4.28 billion with compound interest of 2% over 1000 years.

93 cents would turn into approximately $19,482.22 with compound interest of 1% over 1000 years.

Is a bot really necessary in order to calculate 0.93*(1 + n%)^1000?

Not if you know the formula. I suspect that GP didn't.

I had a tab open and asked a question. It was simpler than running the calculation 3 times. I do in fact understand basic math.

Merry Christmas!

Happy Hanukkah!

The bot does the trivial things well, still need a brain to actually apply these trivial things to solve complex problems - much like a calculator

> The bot does the trivial things well

Clearly not, since all the answers were incorrect; two of them by an order of magnitude:

* 0.93((1.03)^1000) is 6.393E12, not 1.788E13

* 0.93((1.02)^1000) is 3.7E8, not 4.28E9

* 0.93*((1.01)^1000) is 19,492, not 19,482

...on a whim, I just tried asking ChatGPT "What would 93 cents accumulate to over 1000 years with 3% compound interest?", and the answer (179.74) was staggeringly wrong because it thought that 1.03^1000 was approximately 193.48.

How timely that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42484937 was posted today.

To be fair, I qualified the whole thing with “I asked a bot” so I can say I learned a valuable lesson as to the value of LLMs.

I doubt anyone reading this will believe me, today is the second day I have ever tried using an LLM. Talk about a backfire.

Personally, I can say that I just gained a whole _ton_ of respect for you for your ability to learn a lesson, to admit that you made a mistake, and not to double-down on insistence that LLMs are Good, Actually.

I hope my message didn't come across at too unpleasantly confrontational - I'm not annoyed at _you_, but rather at the over-reliance of these hallucination machines in our industry which is supposed to prize hard data and accuracy. I'm glad I was able to help someone gain a bit of reasonable skepticism for them!

All the very best to you and yours for this holiday season!

I like the Compound Interest Calculator on Investor.gov.[1]

[1]: https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calcula...

Is this a rhetorical question? The answer is clearly yes. I never studied organic chemistry.

Cool. Now take the 1,200 Gilder and invest it in that same investment vehicle at 4% and wait 400 years. It's worth $7,807,589,396.13

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