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Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

They should make it work on the 'old money' system of penny, shilling and pound, with twelve pence to a shilling and twenty shillings to the pound, then use the abbreviation 'd' for pence, and then throw in farthings (quarter penny) and half-crowns (two shillings and six pence) because if there's one thing I've learnt about finance, its that the more confusing things are, the easier it is to make a profit.

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Don't forget the guinea: equal to a pound and a shilling, or 21 shillings, for the purposes of bidding for a racehorse.

Also the British Sovereign with a nominal value of a pound an an actual value of about £320 judging by ebay https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2334524...

I see the scams are out in force selling "gold (plated) sovereign".

Not really a scam if they tell you it's plated. Now if they sell it as a real one that's bad.

Because a Sov is actual currency you don't pay VAT and CGT doesn't apply.

Cool.

The funniest thing I've seen on HN in quite a while. You could even monetise it by marketing to those people who are fans of pre-decimal currency for bizarre political reasons.

To be fair, a base-60 system has some value over a base-100 system.

That being said, a pound is so worthless today that the difference between 1/60th of a pound and 1/100th is meaningless; it would just be a rounding error in most calculations.

I suspect that all fractions of a £ will go the way of the shilling in the next 30 years.

Still higher than the dollar? We lost a chunk against the Euro but not as much as I was expecting. The only thing the £ has really devalued against is housing.

While in general quite confusing, I cannot help but notice, that they used to use better divisible numbers like 12, to go to the next bigger unit.

I also read that Babylonians or whoever it was, used a system with base 60, even better divisible.

I wonder how it would affect our daily lives, if we still had such better divisible numbers in use with money today. For example 60 cent make a euro or dollar or whatever. Of course then it might not be called "cent" any longer.

In essence, perhaps not all ideas of such an old system were bad in principle.

My favorite theory explaining the emergence of base- 12 and 60 is counting on your fingers: count up to the 12 phalanges on one hand (using your thumb), then start over and keep track of dozens with the 5 fingers on the other hand.

My parents grew up with the "old money", and my father in particular always said that it was easier to work with because everything divided by 2,3 or 4 easily. His opinion was always that the new money was introduced to make computerisation easier. In other words, the benefit wasn't for humans (who prefer working in 12's), but for computers.

That does not make sense to me, since computers "native" numbers are not binary and the layer on top would not care one bit if it converts the binary representation to whatever base. Not to mention that the wide-spread use of the decimal system among humans happened long before computers where even dreamed of. So those things point to the decimal system adoption having been made for humans and not for computers.

Countries other than the UK had done that step (for currency) centuries before Britain too.

Here is some background: "How Britain converted to decimal currency" -- https://www.bbc.com/news/business-12346083

Also,

> the benefit wasn't for humans (who prefer working in 12's)

I'm not sure what people you know, I don't know anyone who would prefer base 12. That seems like a very bold claim to me - I think I would like to see some evidence for it.

I have no evidence for any of it except the anecdotal mumblings of an old man ;) Though a lot of different societies came up with 12-based systems, so there might be something to it.

It is clear that illiterate people could work in "old money" fine. I suspect this is like the darts players who can do the mental arithmetic involved in a darts match fine, but would consider themselves "bad at maths". It's a learning cliff, but like any learning cliff, it no longer matters once you've climbed it.

It's popular for time. See you in an an hour rather than in 0.041666 days.

That's a bad example, because you use exactly one hour.

If you divide the day in 10, let's call it decile, you would say see you in a decile instead of 2.43 hours.

As a side effect, 2.43h is actually 2h and less than 30 minutes and not 2h and 43 minutes (unintuitive), while 0.41 decile would probably be 41 centile, so conversion would be easier.

Humans have 10 fingers and 10 toes. We almost certainly prefer working with 10s for that reason, all things being equal.

Many ancient human cultures had base 12 and base 60 number systems because there are 12 digit segments that can be indexed by pointing your thumb — 3 segments/digit x 4 fingers

The problem is not a micro-optimization such as using base 10 or base 12. The problem is that we can't all agree on a common measurement system and the biggest economy in the world stubbornly keeps using an archaic and sub-optimal system that it's actively pushing onto the rest of us.

For example, instead of having screen details in sqcm (and aspect ratios), we have inches (and maaaaybe aspect rations mentioned somewhere). This is being pushed <<everywhere>> around the world because of freaking device screens.

It's like a comment about I saw about nature: if we see a rodent eating a bug, that's a bit gross but it's ok (the rodent being a mammal and therefore closer to us, so "superior"), but if we saw a bug eating a rodent, we're appalled. Right now the US imperial measurement system seems like that bug trying to eat the rodent (metric/decimal system).

Historically, metric was the thing being pushed.

The "pushing" isn't the problem.

The nature (good/bad) of the thing being pushed is. The imperial system is objectively inferior since the metric system has been created.

It's inferior for some purposes. It's still ideally suited to the purposes for which it naturally evolved in the first place.

Even about that, I'm not sure. The metric system is damn good even for day to day measurements.

> Of course then it might not be called "cent" any longer.

Would probably be called a sextant, which would raise a few eyebrows in British politics if history is to go by.

I suspect some of there more out there "brexiteers" would like that - I have seen calls for returning to imperial units FFS!

I'd take it over the Euro.

Can I use this to buy a hogshead of ale?

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