Back to the Past for Dollars
"Wouldn't it be great to go back to 1995 and buy dollars for five rubles each? I'd be rich!" shouted one shopkeeper to another in a grocery store when we walked in. Their conversation was a classic "if only" scenario, but let's assume this is possible: there's a time (and space) machine that can send you back to 1995 and return you safely.
Full of joy, you take out loans, borrow from relatives, friends, enemies, scrape together your last savings, and now you have 100 million rubles in your hands. With that, you can buy 20 million dollars and sell them today for 1.5 billion rubles. Not bad, right?
You hop into the machine, land in the summer of 1995 in central Moscow, look around, and begin to realize that a dollar costs not 5 rubles, but 5000 rubles (actually, about 4500), and not the kind you have in your suitcase, but entirely different ones. Your hundred million could become a hundred billion here, but there's nowhere to exchange them.
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