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Xachariah comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81 - Less Wrong
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I think he has six and a quarter years to turn zero galleons into sixty thousand - I interpreted it as him having to pay what he could immediately.
Personally, I'd be inclined to just Imperius Lucius into cancelling the rest of the debt, then obliviate him and memory charm him into remembering doing it of his own free will, but perhaps I'm a little more Dark Harry than Light Harry.
He's got a time machine and the stock market exists.
Give him a few days a month outside of Hogwarts (or just a telephone/television) and he could own every gold mine, hell, own everything in the muggle world. I could pull that off with just a time machine.
What happens if multiple wizards try to Time Turner the stock market? Information can't travel back more than six hours in time. So if Wizard #1 sees a stock price falling, and goes back in time to sell, and Wizard #2 sees effects of that, and goes back in time to sell, weird things happen.
I'm not sure what the six-hour limitation on information actually does, though. We see Bones asking Dumbledore, "I have information which I learned four hours into the future, Albus. Do you still want it?" Dumbledore weighs the value of the information against the value of going back in time more than 2 hours. However, if he rejects that information, and goes back in time 3 hours, he still brings back the knowledge that Bones will have information to share. How exactly does that work?
The impression I got was that the Time Turner would fail to work. Thus, if Bones tells D, then D uses his Time Turner, he only goes back 2 hours.
That's an interesting thought, actually. Can you prevent a person from going back in time by essentially giving them information from the future, even if they don't know it is information from the future?
Unrelated: They did that in a movie called Primer, which I recommend to people who like MOR and deciphering probably-correct engineering-speak.
They do stock market stuff in Primer?
Yes. And it leads to... complications.
Actually, everything they try to do with time in that movie leads to complications, but almost never in the straightforward way you'd expect. For example, it's not the stock market manipulation itself that causes problems.
And naturally he'd start off with seed money from a single lottery win. More than one would start getting suspicious but if he picks the largest paying lottery out there when it has rolled over to jackpot a few times that gives him enough to start the ball rolling.
Most muggleborns may not be able to do calculus, but they know about lotteries. The ministry would keep tabs on this stuff.
Which is why he wouldn't win top prize - 5/6 numbers is usually a couple hundred grand, that's tons of seed money.
If he picked the right lottery he'd only need to do that once, period. There are many lotteries paying out well over two million pounds... But I suspect Locke is right on this count.
By a couple of orders of magnitude (highest in the UK was 150m or so pounds, US has gone up to $390M).
The National Lottery didn't start until 1994. I'm reasonably sure there were such things you could win big on, but I don't think there were any you could win that big on.
'91 pounds?
Why on earth did this not immediately occur to me? This is usually my first thought in time-travel stories. Clearly my dislike of Lucius is clouding my judgement.
I don't think that's how time-travel works in this story.
<never mind this part> Aka DO NOT MESS WITH TIME. </never mind this part>
It's already been stated to be impossible to change your test scores in Hogwards, I think that rules out making fortunes with time travel too, which many people would be highly motivated to do if it were possible; that's not what the world looks like in the story.
I sure hope Harry gets out of this mess somehow, though. The last few chapters have been painful.
EDIT: how do you use strike-out formatting around here? Is it even possible?
It is. Winning on the stockmarket with this time-travel system is barely any different (in terms of mere physics) than using it as a sleep aid.
In a fantasy world this ad hoc most of the wizarding population has to be holding the idiot ball most of the time for things to be as they look in the story.
We're talking about Eliezer!HP, not Rowling!HP.
If using time travel in this way is possible (I maintain it already has been explained it isn't), that opens up a million plot holes and so I predict EY won't go there.
You are wrong. We've already seen more complicated information exploitation scenarios than this.
Narrative necessity dictates that he probably won't.
In the "DO NOT MESS WITH TIME" case, he tried to manipulate time-loop paradoxes in his favour.
In what Xachariah suggests, he'd just be manipulating the stock markets, not deliberately attempting to construct time paradoxe. Therefore I don't think it qualifies as "messing with time".
Right. Silly me.