The quest for world denomination

[amadeus]

El Presidente has appointed you the head of the Central Bank, or else! Congratulations? Your first order of business is to replace the old system of money with a new system.

So, how do you go about it? Coins and bills, how will they be denominated? Something sensible, or something bonkers like Ne Win’s Burma?

File: bonkers 35-kyat note (reverse side)

 

[BornInCantaloup]

Nothing is eternal, including the monetary system.

We abolish all monetary interactions and implement the Index of Social Value (ISV) which grants individuals different levels of allowances, depending on a very careful study of their performance/utility/contribution.
Next, I demote our supreme leader whose yield was found to be negative under the ISV ladder, which I personally designed (what were the odds ?!).
Under popular pressure, I am selected as sole Benefactory Ruler of the Planetary Alliance for an indefinite amount of time.

 

[Kyriakos]

Everyone is forced to use Credits, in a system largely modeled after Beneath a Steel Sky.

 

[amadeus]

Nothing is eternal, including the monetary system.

We abolish all monetary interactions and implement the Index of Social Value (ISV) which grants individuals different levels of allowances, depending on a very careful study of their performance/utility/contribution.
Next, I demote our supreme leader whose yield was found to be negative under the ISV ladder, which I personally designed (what were the odds ?!).
Under popular pressure, I am selected as sole Benefactory Ruler of the Planetary Alliance for an indefinite amount of time.

ok but you still gotta have some numbers!

Everyone is forced to use Credits, in a system largely modeled after Beneath a Steel Sky.

Good idea. We should replace dollars $ with credits, transferable and fungible. We can account for them in ‘c’, but this might be confusing so I propose we put a line through it. ¢, there, like this, so people will know it’s not money.

 

[Kyriakos]

"Game over Amadeus. Be Vigilant!"

 

[BornInCantaloup]

ok but you still gotta have some numbers!

Well, sure. I know everything about the numbers, being a very stable genius, I have all the best numbers.
Do you imply I should dispense them to you ? That is so mean...

 

[AmazonQueen]

First I buy Irn Bru. Then I establish the bottlecap. But only bottlecaps made in Scotland from girders are acceptable. I have also saved the Scottish steel industry and the Union.
Denominations. Well you have the cap for everyday use. Large sums can be handled in girders. 1 girder=1 billion bottlecaps. We will pay off the national debt in girders.

 

[Quintillus]

I live in the U.S. Our currency is pretty okay, if not very exciting. So I'd go with minor tweaks.

Keep things pretty much as they are. Abolish the penny and the nickel. Maybe the dime, too. Basically any coin that costs more than its value to make. Dollar bills are probably going away too, dollar coins are more economical over the long run since they don't wear out for a much longer period of time. Probably would eventually do the same with the two dollar bill, but I might leave it in circulation for a year or two as an experiment to see whether people gravitate towards the dollar coin or the two-dollar bill as a replacement for the discontinued dollar bill. If we do introduce a two-dollar coin, it'll have a hole in the middle like the Danish krone, because that's cool and will make it easy to tell apart just by feel.

I might also replace the $20 bill with a $25 bill. The $10 bill is a bit under-utilized since two of them equals a twenty, so switching to $25 would give the $10 more of a use case, while also requiring fewer bills to be printed to make the same amount of currency. Plus the 25% jump would account for inflation over the past decade. It's be too awkward to replace the $5 bill with a $6.25 bill, but it works for $20 to $25.

I'd consider switching to plastic currency so we don't have to keep re-printing it as often, but the Mint has added a lot of anti-counterfeiting measures to the $100 bill and $50 bill already, so I'd probably defer to their expertise on that. Aside from that, Grants and Benjamins are staying as they are.

-----

Completely seriously though, it really is time for the U.S. to abolish the penny, and probably the nickel. It's been a decade since Canada stopped producing pennies, it's time we joined them.

 

[Samson]

Completely seriously though, it really is time for the U.S. to abolish the penny, and probably the nickel. It's been a decade since Canada stopped producing pennies, it's time we joined them.

So that would make the smallest currency denomination 10 cents? Do no sweets cost less than that these days? It was not that long ago that you could get something good for 1p

 

[AmazonQueen]

So that would make the smallest currency denomination 10 cents? Do no sweets cost less than that these days? It was not that long ago that you could get something good for 1p

I still remember the sweet shop having a penny tray. Nothing cost more than a penny, lots of things were 4 for a penny. Used to take ages to decide how to spend tuppence.

 

[amadeus]

Here in Japan the currency denominations are as follows,

Coins: ¥1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500
Bills: ¥1000, 2000*, 5000, 10000

The ¥2,000 bill somewhat is like the $2 in the U.S., legal tender but mostly unused. The only time I’ve ever gotten them was changing USD to JPY at American banks. I think they were printed as commemorative notes, and I don’t think they are still making them.

I think I would like to see them more in circulation since at present consumer prices do follow within that zone of things costing between ¥1,500 and ¥2,500, but I suppose that is neither here nor there.

One of the pitfalls of growing up with $1 bills and then switching to an equivalent value coin (¥100) is that when I spend one, it feels like I’m spending less money than I really am despite the currency-adjusted prices being roughly equal.

I like the way the stock market used to be priced, in sixteenths of a dollar, so maybe if I were redoing the whole currency system, I’d do it like that: 1/16, 1/8, 1/4 coins. Bills, $1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 100. Sorry, $50 bill, you’re out.

 

[Traitorfish]

Reintroduce the Scottish one pound note. Not because they're useful (they are not), but because they followed the size-based differentiation of British paper denominations and are therefore tiny, which I think is funny.

 

[amadeus]

Reintroduce the Scottish one pound note. Not because they're useful (they are not), but because they followed the size-based differentiation of British paper denominations and are therefore tiny, which I think is funny.

Britain is already a weird country with regards to its money: eight (?) issuing banks, some in Scotland, and English shopkeepers can refuse to accept Scottish notes?

Also, the Bank of England has a £100,000,000 note but it is boring, only used for bank transactions. You’d think they’d have something nicer-looking than just a piece of PC paper that says “oy here be quid” but you’d be wrong.

 

[Kyriakos]

Pounds never really looked nice.Probably also the result of having to use the same person's face on all of them, as if this is a hellenistic empire.

 

[Traitorfish]

Britain is already a weird country with regards to its money: eight (?) issuing banks, some in Scotland, and English shopkeepers can refuse to accept Scottish notes?

Yes, there are three Scottish and four Northern Irish banks which have the right to issue their own currency. Because these notes don't circulate much outside of their home countries, English merchants can be suspicious of them. It's not always clear if it's because they are less comfortable identifying counterfeits or if they think it is genuinely foreign currency.

I'd be curious to know if rates of rejection vary between issuing banks; Royal Bank of Scotland notes look vageuly similar to Bank of England notes in their design, whereas Clydesdale Bank notes look like gift certificates for a Scottish-themed casual dining restaurant, so you could imagine one being rejected at higher rates than the other. The Irish, naturally, take things to silly extremes, and issue banknotes that claims to be Danish.

 

[Zardnaar]

Pounds never really looked nice.Probably also the result of having to use the same person's face on all of them, as if this is a hellenistic empire.

View attachment 634768

Been looking at her mug my entire life on our currency.

Even on pre decimel currency (1967) she's still on a good chunk of it.

Oh well could be worse.