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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

The Titanic was built a bit over 100 years ago for 1.5m pounds -- today that'd buy you a nice London two-bedroom apartment.

I wonder if in 100 years from now, people will casually be talking about their nice (but modest) London two-bedroom apartment they bought for 100m pounds.

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Peoples perceptions of number sizes don't change quickly. 1 million will still seem like a big number. It's likely at some point we'll have to re-denominate. There will be a 'new Pound' or something that is worth 100 'old Pounds'.

You can see the number phenomenon today. People still talk about "winning £1M on the Lottery" like it'd set them up for a life of luxury. To reasonably replace even a median UK full-time salary for life you're going to need around ~£700K in assets. That leaves £300K for a modest home somewhere outside of London and the South East. One false move with your £1M winnings and you'll end up back in the office. The £ is worth half of what it was in 1994 when the Lottery started.

Or we can make 100 trillion pound notes like in Zimbabwe https://www.cnn.com/2016/05/06/africa/zimbabwe-trillion-doll...

Or japan. In romania people still say “one million” instead of “one hundred”

It was ZWB (Zimbabwe dollars), but I can see why you would assume "pound" given the country's history. Source: I have one of these notes on my coffee table :) It lives with a $1 bill that was printed only a couple of years before it.

Bad stuff happens when a government gets these things wrong!

Interesting. I remember that some Bitcoin people were trying to do the reverse when the price was 1000+ by talking about mBTC instead of BTC. I guess http://bitcoinity.org/markets still does it.

Of course, if you convert that to current value that’s something like £235M at current rates, which seems more plausible (and would have been more like £400M without the self-inflicted damage of Brexit). New cruise ships cost more but they’re also larger and have more amenities, and holding so many more passengers means more expenses for things like furnishings.

Turkish did that. In my childhood bread was 200.000 liras for example.

About a decade ago they renominated it. "New Turkish Lira" was born, where 1.000.000 Old Lira = 1 Lira.

So as another comment has mentioned, probably that would happen.

The Titanic cost $7.5 million to build, which is $200 million in today's money (as of 2020) [1]. I'm pretty confident this is not the cost of the average flat in London.

[1] https://www.history.com/news/titanic-facts-construction-pass...

The price was 1.5m pounds, as the ship was not built in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic

Pretty sure the Titanic was paid in GBP -- the 1.5M GBP number is correct, the exchange rate was bit different back than.

https://steemit.com/money/@lixtiklipbalm/exchange-rate-of-br...

And when the Titanic cost £1.5M, the average weekly wage in the UK was £5.

/r/whoosh

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