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I think it's the worst example. I very much doubt we will ever see the price of, say, a car approach a billion billion dollars (or cents). It's too many zeros for people to work with on a daily basis. I think what will happen is that, at regular intervals, the old hyper-inflated currency will be replaced with a new currency that's, say, 2^32 times less than the original one.

Besides, if you think a billion billions might be reached (64 bits) then why wouldn't a billion billion billion billions also be reached (128 bits)? 128 bits seems just as arbitrary as 64 bits in this context.




> It's too many zeros for people to work with on a daily basis. I think what will happen is that, at regular intervals, the old hyper-inflated currency will be replaced with a new currency that's, say, 2^32 times less than the original one.

I lived through hyperinflation (in Brazil). What happened was that, at regular intervals, the old hyper-inflated currency was replaced with a new currency that's 10^3 times less than the original one. Cutting decimal zeros is better for humans, and three is convenient because it matches the usual three-digit grouping (that is, 123.450,00 becomes 123,45). This had to be done because, otherwise, calculators would become useless (most common pocket calculators had only eight digits).


Before 2009 would you have predicted that a 100 Trillion Dollar bill would never be issued by a central bank?


Germany had notes and stamps in the trillions Marks in 1924 - nothing new there


2^63 / 100 Trillion = 9.2E6 so even in this case you have few decimal positions left.


You may be overlooking the potential for someone to own more than one of those $100T bills. Apparently it was worth about 30 USD at the time.


If $100T = 30 USD, then probably nobody will mind if we round to the nearest $1B. Just like how I have no way to compensate someone for less than 0.01 USD.


The government cares, the precision necessary for taxes is sub cent as mentioned in some replies to the top comment on this post.




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