I'm a tinkerer, working in my garage on a time machine. I had some success.
Saying "I built the time machine" would be too much. I built the receiver. It can provide exactly one bit of information, 0 or 1; building the unit cost me about \$10k, it takes a lot of electricity, about \$100/day worth, and it needs to be continuously powered at least until the value of the bit of information is set (in the future) using the "transmitter" module - which I have a good hunch I can build, but still no good clue, how. It's gonna be expensive, considerably more so than the receiver, though I still don't know how much... ten times maybe?
What's worse, if the receiver is powered off or breaks before the value is set, or the device breaks, the value I had read today is just a fluke of quantum uncertainty, worthless. Still, I'm willing to take the risk, and exploit what I have right now, to create the transmitter.
I have a common, stable job (university staff, non-teaching), no debts, earning roughly $30k/year and a month worth of savings; can set aside half of my salary, have no special connections, partners, resources.
I can build more receiver units providing I have the money to build and run them. One unit will take about a month to build in my garage, considerably less (and cost maybe half as much) if done "factory style", although setting this up would cost an arm and a leg. Each unit is another single bit of data, sent from unknown future, needing to be maintained until transmitter is created.
I also want to retain monopoly on the device. Never mind, until I have a solid proof it works, nobody's gonna believe it. My theory is sound, but the moment I publish it, bye-bye monopoly, never mind some idiot creating a hard paradox and breaking the universe (which my theory foresees; I absolutely don't intend to create the hard paradox; meanwhile soft paradox is fully allowable: I can use data from the future, which I obtained thanks to that very data.)
Once I have the transmitter, it's gonna be a breeze, a singularity. Put the unit in a hotel room above a casino with roulette, 0 black, 1 red, always bet 1/35th on 0, roughly 10 minutes to nearly double my capital (always setting some aside in case of a fluke), then invest in more units and I can receive whole books from the future in no time, build automated systems that game the market, win wars and discover immortality.
But the problem is now and here. I need to decide what the data means, how to interpret it, to maximum advantage, so that my future self will be able to set it to the value I read today. And I need to develop a strategy to achieve the success before I grow old.
How can I succeed?
Edit: since the way the machine works causes a lot of confusion, let's take a simple example.
I already have a transmitter+receiver unit. I want to determine the result of a coin toss I will perform.
Scenario 1:
- I decide "Heads=0, Tails=1."
- I power the receiver unit on, then press "read". A LED by "1" lights up.
- I toss the coin. It lands tails up.
- I press the button labeled "1" on the transmitter, because that was Tails, and because I don't want to break the universe.
- I can now power the unit off, or reset it and perform another experiment.
Scenario 2: (never happens)
- I decide "Heads=0, Tails=1."
- I power the receiver unit on, then press "read". A LED by "1" lights up.
- I toss the coin. It lands heads up.
- I power the device off, without touching the transmitter, because I don't want to break the universe ;) (I might also press 0 on the transmitter instead).
Thing is, if I definitely intend to press the button corresponding to how the coin lands, and carry out my intention, it will always land the way the readout indicated. I'm never compelled by "fate" to go with scenario 2, the readout will be correct unless, say, power outage happens or things other than me not wanting to break the universe force me to enter wrong value or power the device off early. In other words, if I press "1" on the transmitter, then most definitely the receiver had lit "1" before, and unless I intentionally try to create a paradox and change my prior intention, I'm never forced to create it:
Scenario 3: (can happen)
- I decide "Heads=0, Tails=1."
- I power the receiver unit on, then press "read". A LED by "1" lights up.
- I toss the coin. It lands heads up.
- I only get to mutter "I wonder what will..." when a lightning hits the nearby building and power goes out in the whole block.
Edit2: I can't get anything else out of device during the reception-transmission period. I can only either wait (delay transmission) or power it off (make reception random/worthless.) I can't enter or transmit any extra bit over the same device. Think of it as a single bit of computer memory (RAM), only write is performed after read, instead of before.