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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

> Learning about the history of money and how it completely shaped the world is pretty fascinating.

The first chapter of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations also covers some of this. Specifically I remember the clipping topic, and then landlords weighing payments to protect themselves from clipping.

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Weighing coins was always the preferred way of counting money. The pound sterling is called the pound sterling because 240 mediaeval pennies minted from sterling silver weighed one pound.

And some modern coins are designed so that bags of mixed coins can be counted by weight. For instance, all US cupronickel clad coins (dime, quarter, Kennedy half-dollar and Eisenhower dollar) have the same ratio of weight to value, such that a pound of any combination of them is worth $20.

This is sort of interesting as historical trivia, but at what point would it become convenient or useful? You'd need to sort your coins before weighing them, and it seems like if you were partly sorting your coins you may as well totally sort them.

Since the coins have the same ratio of value to weight, you don't need to sort them before weighing them. Still pointless though!

You would, because you have to get rid of all the pennies, nickels, and oddball dollar coins.

> such that a pound of any combination of them is worth $20

Also most of the time you can just dump a bag of coins on the table and visually quickly determine an odd ones, remove them, weight the remainder. Sorting != counting.

I had no idea. That's actually really neat!

An interesting side effect of clipping was essentially the discovery of Gresham's Law. The Bad Money drives out good money. While essentially understood/internalized by the merchant class plebiscite(heh) for thousands of years, wasn't formalized until the mid 1800s.

For clipping it means that when new coinage is minted that money is typically horded and the clipped coins are kept in circulation because they are deemed less valuable then their nominal value (the initial weight of the coin).

Why would someone use something more valuable in an exchange when the thing that's less valuable will suffice?

Gresham's Law would end up plaguing monarchy's and various governments for millenia and still to this day really.

We vastly under appreciate the very basic technology used to solve problems that existed for pretty much the entire world for thousands of years.

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