Assume that the future can change based on your actions, so any historical information that you bring along with you from the intervening 25 years may quickly drift out of the new realities history.
Edit: also assume that you can be given a healthy 21-year-old body if you want or take your previous self’s place.
Further, identification will be provided for you if you were not born at that time.
You could just spread it across a bunch of GICs and then ETFs that were solid performers. You have your lottery money, you just need to earn enough to live the way you want. With enough invested but diversified you could make a fortune without influencing anything as a result of personal choices.
If anythjng, the initial lottery win will have the biggest impact on the timeline, assuming you lay low afterward.
Now, here’s the thing. I’d say you would be sharing those winnings with the original winner unless you prevented them from getting the ticket so find a jackpot twice as big as you need and hope a bunch of yous from alternate timeline don’t get the same idea.
That’s what would happen to me and I’d end up winning about $3.50.
If a bunch of you’s from another timeline can come too, that opens the door to more interesting shenanigans anyway, like if they all get unique valid IDs, one of you could run for political office and get enough alternative selves to come back and vote for them to win. Or get different versions of yourself to run for all the political offices in a given area while bringing enough copies to win all their elections, and completely dominate the politics of the area by having everyone in office have the same or very similar views.
The downside here is I’d have to spend all my time with other me’s. I’m pretty sure I’d get on my nerves very quickly.
You could also find some of the lottery winners that absolutely hated what happened to their lives after they won and win the draw right before their ticket would have won.
That way you spare them the misery that the money brought them and you get a nice chunk of change for yourself in the process.
The January 2nd Powerball draw was not won by anyone and paid $39M.
That’s plenty of seed money to invest in Google, Bitcoin, et al with perfect knowledge of stock trends. Even if it’s only short term knowledge due to breaking from the original timeline, you could easily grow your investment into the billions overnight.
Perhaps the most amazing stock of the year was Xcelera.com, formerly known as Scandinavia. Once a closed-end fund specializing in Scandinavian stocks, and then an operating company that owned a hotel in the Canary Islands, it made a small investment in an Internet company last year. Before it disclosed that investment, the family of Alexander Vik, the company’s chief executive, was given options to buy a million shares of stock, at a price of $3.25 each. The shares ended 1998 at $3.75, or $1.25 adjusted for two subsequent splits. They ended 1999 at $139.50, an increase of 11,060 percent. The Viks’ option position is now valued at $415 million.