The reason old currency units were large is because they’re derived from weights of silver (eg a pound sterling or the equivalent French system dating back to Charlemagne), and the pound is a reasonably-sized base unit of weight, so the corresponding monetary unit was extremely large. There would be nothing wrong with having $1000 currency units again, it’s just that we usually have inflation rather than deflation. In crypto none of the reasonably sized subdivisions have caught on and it seems tolerable to buy a sandwich for 0.0031 ETH if that were common.
Currencies are redenominated after sufficient inflation only when the number of zeros on everything gets unwieldy. This requires replacing all cash and is a bad look because it’s usually done after hyperinflation, so countries like South Korea haven’t done it yet.
The Iranian rial’s exchange rate, actually around 1e-6 now, is so low partly due to sanctions, and is in the middle of redenomination from 10000 rial = 1 toman.
When people make a new currency, they make it similar to the currencies of their largest trading partners for convenience, hence why so many are in the range of the USD, euro and yuan. Various regional status games change this but not by an order of magnitude, and it is conceivable to me that we could get a $20 base unit if they escalate a bit.
My views which I have already shared in person:
The reason old currency units were large is because they’re derived from weights of silver (eg a pound sterling or the equivalent French system dating back to Charlemagne), and the pound is a reasonably-sized base unit of weight, so the corresponding monetary unit was extremely large. There would be nothing wrong with having $1000 currency units again, it’s just that we usually have inflation rather than deflation. In crypto none of the reasonably sized subdivisions have caught on and it seems tolerable to buy a sandwich for 0.0031 ETH if that were common.
Currencies are redenominated after sufficient inflation only when the number of zeros on everything gets unwieldy. This requires replacing all cash and is a bad look because it’s usually done after hyperinflation, so countries like South Korea haven’t done it yet.
The Iranian rial’s exchange rate, actually around 1e-6 now, is so low partly due to sanctions, and is in the middle of redenomination from 10000 rial = 1 toman.
When people make a new currency, they make it similar to the currencies of their largest trading partners for convenience, hence why so many are in the range of the USD, euro and yuan. Various regional status games change this but not by an order of magnitude, and it is conceivable to me that we could get a $20 base unit if they escalate a bit.