Ask Lemmy

And it’ll be easy to get near him because you’re a kid

This is, I'm sorry to say, baloney.

In 2002 Windows XP was already out and natively supported NTFS volumes. So did Windows 2000. XP even supported ExFAT volumes with a patch which was released in April 2001. If you're a Linux nerd, ext2 or ext3 could easily handle the partition and file sizes required. ext2 had already been available for decades at that point and ext3 was released in 2001 and readily available by 2002.

Without media, the current Wikipedia (according to itself) is a hair over 24 gigabytes not including images and media, which'd fit on a 32 gig flash drive that, while it would be absolutely amazing to 2002 users just based on its sheer usable volume, would handily accept a bog standard NTFS partition readable on any XP or Win2k machine.

There were no flash storage based drives bigger than one or two gigs in 2002, but there were plenty of external USB hard drives in that era that readily exceeded the 4 gig FAT32 file size limit. I know this well because I was there at the time, and I owned several of them. You had to manually format them as NTFS to be able to use the entire capacity effectively and with large files, but they absolutely did work over USB... Just not if you bunged them into a Windows 98 or ME machine. A modern flash drive would be no different. In all practicable terms you could mount a volume up to 2.2 terabytes (i.e. round thousands) or 2.0 tebibytes (powers of two, if you can countenance sounding ridiculous for using the word "tebibyte") in XP/2K if it were formatted NTFS without having to engage in any chicanery or third party tools. Even a ten year old could do it. You plug it in, and it'd Just Work.

Including media the entirety of the Wikimedia Commons is something like 420 TB, which would be a challenge even today to load onto a single USB flash drive. If you were going to include the media (images and videos) these would probably have to be downscaled significantly in order to fit on any single portable drive, even current ones.

The text content of Wikipedia would be no problem whatsoever. USB 3.0 didn't exist yet, though, so at best you'd be chugging along loading everything at 2.0 speed if you had a compliant board and all the correct drivers for it (and were running at least Win2k service pack 4). You'd want an HTML dump, not one of their database dumps, because running the current Wikimedia software and database versions would be a challenge for sure. But a browser from 2002 shouldn't trip up on any Wikipedia content except perhaps any .webp images (2010), or h264/h265 video content.

You'd have a much bigger problem if OP warped you and your USB drive back to 1998 or worse, 1995.

For the sake of the scenario, in addition to the details listed in the body of the post, assume the USB drive is type A and is readable by any PC with a USB type A connector, regardless of generation. It can also be read regardless of file system.

There's an inherent supernatural element to the premise, so assume "it just works." There can be a specialized browser on the drive as well if you feel like you wouldn't be able to make use of the raw HTML files.

I can mount an old drive made in 2002 right now, formatted in a 2002 era format, and put text files on it, compressed with tar and gz from 1990 if need be.

I assume that is the hardware we have to work with in this scenario.

That’s the impossible part?

I doubt even the max number of USB 1.1 devices per bus can hold the size of current Wikipedia. (Quick Google shows ~4TB usb3.2 drives. And 127 individual devices. Gives you Max 508TB. In 2023 the size of everything in Wikipedia was ~430TB. )

Or Apple, or nVidia. Or all of the above.

Edit: Actually, nVidia would be a bad call. Apple I think would result in around a 6000% return on investment by our deadline, which isn't exactly a rocket ride to the moon, but you could probably use Wikipedia's articles on pump and dumps and other financial scams to know in advance what's going to happen, and be one of those at the top of the pyramid rather than the bottom in order to raise yourself more short term capital.

As for all the comments about everyone going for the Get Rich path and not the Nobel Prize... Well, yeah. Even if you do have a literally encyclopedic knowledge of current and future geopolitical events, it's unlikely anyone important is going to listen to a 10 year old. Especially so if you're not allowed to give the game away. You could readily trade stocks online in 2002, though, even if you were a minor as long as you could employ some creativity (or get permission from your parents). How convenient that by the time you're ready to cash out, you've just turned into a legal adult.

Bitcoin wasn’t invented until 2008 and launched in 2009. Your deadline is 2010. Someone bought 2 pizzas for 10,000 bitcoin in 2010.

The years of buildup to you getting 300B before 2016 would alter the course of history though, making all your knowledge useless after you've amassed whatever amount changes history. You'd be hard pressed to make financial gains before you're 18, so you'd amass 300B between 2010 and 2016. At some point early on you'd draw too much attention and change history enough to have no idea what's coming.

This is truly the way.

10,000 bitcoins were worth ~$20-40 in 2010.

You will need ~500,000,000,000 (500 Billion) bitcoin (unless my math is wrong, but suffice it to say, it’s a lot).

I believe to date only about ~20 million have been mined.

Well you're in luck, one bonus of the scenario is stipulated in the body of the post!

Your biological sex matches your gender identity (flip a coin if you are enby)

Anakin? Is that you?

Alternatively, owning a pizza restaurant that accepts bitcoin is a good way to get lots of it quickly.