Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

Kominers’s Conundrums: Take a Crypto Break With Ancient Traders

Can you decode a tablet belonging to an ancient commodities trader?

May 16, 2021 at 12:00 PM UTC

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University department of economics.

You may need an abacus or two for this one.
Photographer: EyeEm/Getty Images

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With Elon Musk tanking crypto last week, the team at Conundrums has decided it may be time to look into more tangible alternative currencies.

Luckily, Conundrums archaeologist Paul Kominers2recently discovered an intact premodern tablet belonging to an ancient commodities trader. We passed it along to the translation team, which was able to determine that the trader was about to make a big, big move. Unfortunately, however, even our expert translators found some of the idioms — shall we say — puzzling.1 Now it’s up to you.