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nprfreshair:

“A billboard for ‘The Zimbabwean Newspaper’ made entirely of worthless Zimbabwean bank notes. What more proof do you need of a country’s total economic collapse than being able to paste trillions and trillions and trillions of dollar notes onto a billboard and it is still cheaper than if you had used paper?”

Tomorrow: journalist Peter Godwin, who grew up in Zimbabwe. His book The Fear is about Robert Mugabe’s torture campaign to intimidate those who would vote against him. 

curiositycounts:

Bitcoin – anonymous decentralized P2P currency. For when, you know, banks don’t let you donate to Wikileaks.

"The four economists wanted to create a new currency that was stable, dependable and trustworthy. The only catch: This currency would not be real. No coins, no bills. It was fake.

“We called it a Unit of Real Value — URV,” Bacha says. “It was virtual; it didn’t exist in fact.”

People would still have and use the existing currency, the cruzeiro. But everything would be listed in URVs, the fake currency. Their wages would be listed in URVs. Taxes were in URVs. All prices were listed in URVs. And URVs were kept stable — what changed was how many cruseros each URV was worth.

Say, for example, that milk costs 1 URV. On a given day, 1 URV might be worth 10 cruseros. A month later, milk would still cost 1 URV. But that 1 URV might be worth 20 cruzeiros.

The idea was that people would start thinking in URVs — and stop expecting prices to always go up.

“We didn’t understand what it was,” says Maria Leopoldina Bierrenbach, a housewife from Sao Paulo. “I used to say it was a fantasy, because it was not real.”

Still, people used URVs. And after a few months, they began to see that prices in URVs were stable. Once that happened, Bacha and his buddies could declare that the virtual currency would become the country’s actual currency. It would be called the real.

“Everyone is going to receive from now on their wages, and pay for all the prices, in the new currency, which is the real,” Bacha says. “That is the trick."

Single most interesting thing I’ve read in ages. And makes me slap my head, staring down the etymological origins of the Brazilian Real. 

How Fake Money Saved Brazil : Planet Money : NPR

(via slavin)

(via slavin)

vanderwal:

The last version of the Dutch 50 gulden. Such wonderfully design currency.

via upload.wikimedia.org

this is the sort of note I want peeking out in my wallet—currency can have bold elements without being fugly (see: U.S. currency use of purple).

Hmm, wood tokens as alternative currency at a farmers’ market - is this a good idea or not? To be very academic and literal, should these be called “tokens”? (note to self: should visit in Santa Monica and in MN and watch vendor/customer interaction with this system)

also: in MN, you can also use VISA to purchase tokens, which levels this system, I think, and potentially allows customers with limited amounts of cash (and potentially plenty of plastic) to buy more. troubling language, though, from the site: “As the only market in town with our own currency, you may just feel like you are in another country while shopping Midtown!” Another country?

—found via tumblelikeyougiveadamn:

Jan Chipcase blogs about a constrained use currency similar to the one being used at the Midtown Farmers Market:

A relatively high proportion of the purchases made in this market will be cash. One of the side-effects of supporting this system is that the market management have a (slightly) better awareness of which stalls are attracting welfare customers and the relative popularity of each stalls to those customers.