>>>Decimilisation of our currency was a huge boost to inflation. I never saw the benefit. its supposed to make calculations simpler but I never saw a lot of people struggling with 12 pennies in a shilling, the threepenny bit, the sixpence, the half crown (two shillings and sixpence), the florin (two shillings). That was proper money.
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>>And we still use the expression "old money" in amusing ways, eg "Today it will be 25 degrees C - that's 77 in old money"
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>Funny are the ways of the world. We had our first money change in 1965, when two zeros were dropped, but we kept expressing everything in the old dinars for at least 25 years more - my first salary was about 10K, but when asked I would say it was a million. Only Miloševic's exponential inflation managed to kill the habit, well, regarding monetary amounts only. I think I can still hear "can you express that in old units" (like calories instead of jouls, or atmospheres instead of kilopascals), as "how much is that in old dinars".

The same thing happened here in 1970, when 2 zeros where dropped, people used the old currency values for 13 years, until 1983 where 4 more zeros where dropped, making it a total of 6 from the original 1881 money. Then people rapidly started using the new units, since the conversion was very easy: 1 new = 1,000,000 old.

The mistake was not dropping 3 zeros or a multiple of 3, to make it easy to do the conversion, dropping by the thousands is easier and more "natural".

We dropped 3 more zeros in 1985 and 4 more in 1992. So we went from having a stable currency for 90 years since 1881 (when the country really "started"), to dropping 13 zeros between 1970 and 1992. Nice management by the politicians.

So one peso of today equals 10,000,000,000,000 pesos of 1881.

Carlos