What would you rather take if I offered you....?

Question

Would you take the $10,000 dollars or a penny each day doubling the amount I give you each day for 30 days?

COME ON, THINK!

Answer 1

"$10000 - I'm all for instant gratification and I can hear a gorgeous pair of Marc Jacobs boots calling me... "

Please tell me this isn't the future of America. We'd rather have a pair of boots today than 10 million at the end of the month? We are all going to DIE.

Anyways, about the pennies for copper scheme....

1,073,745,919 pennies would get you $10.73 million from a bank.

A penny is weighs 2.5 g, and is 2.5% copper. Converting to lbs (since that is how it is sold), 1 penny contains 0.000137789 lbs of copper. The current price of copper is ~$3.50 /lb (it fluctuates day to day so we'll go with this estimate).

1,073,745,919*0.000137789*$3.50 = $517,826

Not quite the jackpot you had hoped for. But, you forget that the rest of the penny is 97.5% zinc. So 1 penny has 0.0053737 lbs of zinc in it. Scrap zinc sells for ~$1.50 per pound.

1,073,745,919*0.0053737*$1.50 = $8,654,982

So the total cost of all the metal in your pennies is $9,172,808.

This is less than the $10,730,000. Not to mention the cost of melting all of this metal and transporting it. This all makes sense in the end, the cost of the metal in the penny is worth less than the penny itself. (Although the cost of operation at a mint makes the price of production for a penny 4.1 cents, but you get my point).

Answer 2

I am too lazy to figure out the penny -plus what would I do with all those pennies. That is a lot of change to roll. I would take the $10,000 today and not have to worry about it.

P.S. I just worked out the penny and it would be a very lucrative offer.

Answer 3

If you give me 1 penny the first day, 2 pennies the 2nd day, 4 the 3rd, ....

Then, on the 30th day, you will give me 2^29th pennies.

Summing all this, you will have given me 1 penny short of 2^30th pennies.

This is 1 penny short of 1024*1024*1024. This is more than 1,000,000 pennies and is therefore more than 10,000 dollars. But, I would gladly take it all in pennies and then sell the copper :)

Answer 4

I would choose the penny to double each day for 30 days.
John

Answer 5

Doubling pennies, please.
After 30 days, I'd have (2^30 - 1) pennies.
1073741823¢ = $10,737,418.23

Of course, if you paid me all in pennies, it would weigh about 3000 tons and would take up a volume of about 17,000 cubic feet... roughly the size of my house. You can dump it in my back yard.

If a person can roll two 50¢ rolls of pennies per minute, I could hire 450 kids looking for a summer job at $15 per hour, 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, for 10 weeks for a total payroll expense of $2.7 million, spend whatever it costs on transportation to the bank, and keep well over seven million dollars for myself. Anyone looking for a summer job?

Answer 6

Penny

Answer 7

I'm takin´ that penny because at the end of 30 days I would have almost 11 million bucks.

Answer 8

I'll take the penny :)
I haven't done the calculation but I know it's got to add up to alot more than $10,000

Answer 9

1penny on 1st day.
2 pennies on 2nd day.
4 pennies on 3rd day.
8 pennies on 4th day.
and so on ................
536, 870, 912 pennies on 30th day.

That is (536, 870, 912) / 100 = $5, 368, 709·12

But I won't be greedy, I'll settle for the $10, 000·00 if you are giving it away.

Answer 10

A PENNY EACH DAY DOUBLING THE AMOUNT FOR 30 DAYS AND SO I WOULD BE PERHAPS MORE RICH THAN BILL GATES WITHIN A MONTH