The winners of the poll

Were all the voters that picked 600 euro! Congratulations! The exact amount was 580 euro and 6 cents. The 6 cents were directly dropped into the now empty jars and 80 euro was kept in cash and 500 was added to the bank account.

There were also some foreign coins that had sneaked itself into the jars over the years and those the woman at Deutsche Bundesbank came back and gave to me.

By the look of it the coins were mainly Swedish crowns and Polish zloty to a total value of around 2 euro but that I excluded.

The final voting results from the blog was:

Less than 300: 10 votes (40%)

600: 12 votes (48%)

900: 2 votes (8%)

1200 or above: 1 votes (4%) 

 

The exact same question that was given to you I also sent out privately in an email to friends and family that have seen the jars when visiting me. To them was given no suggestions for answers.

It was interesting to see how differently people answered. As an example... some people makes purely a guess of the value and since I have many scientific friends also many of them were making serious calculations and assumptions. Some people were rounding the answer off to complete euros or even rounding up/down to full 5 or 10 euro.

For those who calculated they started off by digging out the specifications of the different coins as can be seen for instance here.

From that they then calculated what would be the maximum and minimum value based on the 17.9 kg weight of coins.

So the maximum value would be 1147 euro and the lowest would be 78 euro. Based on the above calculation they took a closer look at the picture and decided upon a value that they thought would be the best one!

The direct winner was a friend of mine and she replied 600 jorussar (=euro) which was purely a guess. When it comes to the calculations then the closest one had calculated it to be 591.7962 euro which he unfortunately decided to round up to 625 euro but I must say that his calculation was pretty much spot on! Well done!

When it comes to the worst replies then there it was also calculation but too fast and forgetting to divide the value by a factor of 10 and did instead by a factor of 2 which made her end up with 3200 euro instead of a guess of 740 euro.

The worst reply on the lower end was 48 euro. What is interesting there is that it was also a calculation. He took some euro coins a mixture from 50 cents down to 1 cent or whatever he had on himself he then checked the weight of that and recalculated that for 17.9 kg.

It is sad to see how dangerous the calculation approach can be when there is no logical or maybe better put a reality check afterwards and especially since people consider that since there was a calculation made it must be also be correct. That is just pure and simply wrong... As an example... 48 euro would only be 96 pieces of 50 cent coins which there was clearly much more then that in the bottles.

So once again congratulations to all of you that voted 600 euro and as my brother told me that money would have been better on the stock market over those years and I fully agree... but better later then never.