The holographic principle was inspired by black hole thermodynamics, which conjectures that the maximum entropy in any region scales with the radius squared, and not cubed as might be expected, so called Bekenstein bound. In the case of a black hole, the insight was that the information content of all the objects that have fallen into the hole might be entirely contained in surface fluctuations of the event horizon. The holographic principle resolves the black hole information paradox within the framework of string theory. However, there exist classical solutions to the Einstein equations that allow values of the entropy larger than those allowed by an area law (radius squared), hence in principle larger than those of a black hole. These are the so-called " Wheeler's bags of gold". The existence of such solutions conflicts with the holographic interpretation, and their effects in a quantum theory of gravity including the holographic principle are not yet fully understood.