Accidentally stumbled on this word in wikipedia.. Tontine.. an interesting word to know.
It has an interesting meaning.
Actually two meanings.. one a software tech word, another as a finance scheme name.
First the techy: Tontines are secret programs that generate many secret keys (or codes) to be given to as many people protecting a particular data/information in digital format, locked with the program.. and if more than one person who has these codes come together, they can use their keys to unlock the program and see the actual information.
As wikipedia says it: a tontine is a secret sharing algorithm which allows n people to share secret data, such that any k of them can reconstruct it by combining their keys.
This was interesting, because I have always heard of only one person entity, or two person entity holding the secret code to protected information in software.. so knowing that 'n' person entity could hold keys, though two of the keys would be enough to unlock the information that is protected, was interesting.
Second the finance scheme: Tontines are financial schemes that work like this - All members of the scheme put in a capital amount and get paid dividends every year until their death.. and the capital is never paid. And on death of members the dividends paid to others adds up with proportionate value of the divdend that would have been paid to the dead if they were alive.
After many many revisions and transitions of this, 'pension' schemes were invented it seems.
It is named Tontine, or Tonti-ne, after the person Lorenzo de Tonti who is credited with inventing or popularizing the sceme first in France.
The wealthy Tontine scheme:
The Tontine scheme had many variants.. one of the popular variant was this: Apart from the normal dividends payment of the scheme, the total capital of all investors in the scheme is paid to the last surviving investor.. and eventually the last survivor becomes very wealthy.
This variant of the scheme has been popularized much by novels and stories that use this wealthy variant as the plot for murder mysteries where all investors of the tontine are killed to get all the money to the last survivor.
Why don't we have this scheme today: Looks like this scheme or its variants was mostly used by governments in early days (something like 17th century or 18th) to raise funds for wars, and big expenses... and governments or marketers inherently allowed young people also to become investors on the scheme whereby a 5 year old girl can invest some 300 Livres(one of many currency types used in ancient France) and reap dividends till she dies.
Government started feeling the costs of surviving the scheme go up and up because people lived longer.. also girl children were chosen by parents for the scheme because women were known to live longer than men in those days.
Other than this, private companies or agencies who ran tontine schemes mostly made a scam of it. The scheme was more attractive and easy to swindle a lot of money which many did use of well. This led to the England and American governments banning the scheme in those days itself.. so it never came to more recent centuries.
They say, there are tontines even today in the underworld.
Read more on Tontines at: Tontine - wikipedia
