1 USD is worth approx 45000 Iranian rial. Is there a currently tradeable currency where 1 of its main denomination, (ie no subdivisions) is worth less than 1 rial?
Looks like the rial is at the bottom at the moment, twice as valuable as a dong.
According to Google a dollar is now worth 125 000 Venezuelan bolivars making it less worth than the rial.
…said no one, ever.
It is also tangentially relevant to look at what the smallest circulating unit is. If the smallest valid coin is worth 50 rials, then, practically speaking, at the current official exchange rate that is worth roughly a tenth of a US cent–not too great, but maybe you could still buy a stick of gum with of a bunch of them. By contrast, there used to be 0.01 bolivar coins! But they relatively recently struck off another three zeros and made the minimum coin worth 0.50, bringing it, for now, back to the range where it might be worth something. Similarly, I don’t believe you can go below 200 đồng or so.
That makes me wonder if Japanese rin coins are still legal tender. Worth 1/1,000th of a yen each (so around 1/100,000th of a dollar depending on the exchange rate) could you theoretically spend a sack full of them? Sure it would be stupid, given their vastly larger collector’s value, but are they still recognized?
Reminds me of the story of people melting down 5-, 2-, 1-, and 1/2-rupee coins into razor blades, because they were made of steel.
Just a few years ago it would have been the Zim, the currency of Zimbabwe that was issued on single ply perforated rolls.
There was a point where the Venezuelan bolivar was worth less than 1 World of Warcraft gold piece (finally convertible when calculating currency exchanges thanks to the WoW Token).
Not since 1954. 1-円 minimum.
I’d buy that for a dollar
I’d buy that for a dollar
I was thinking about this area just yesterday, while reading an article on cell phones that gave prices in Korean won, with the phones costing more than a million won. A won is 100 jeon. At around 120,000 jeon to the dollar it isn’t a record breaker, but definitely awkward and seriously in need of a revaluation.
Dangit, I guess we didn’t unbump this thread quick enough after the spam. But anyway,
But which one of those is the primary unit? I mean, the US has monetary units spanning four orders of magnitude (10,000 mills in an eagle), but nobody cares, because nobody ever uses mills or eagles (for that matter, nobody ever uses the dime as a unit, either). And even among the two US units that are used, nobody would ever say “The US cent is down 5% today relative to the Euro”, or the like.
Well, even the main unit is more than 1,200 to the dollar. So it really is like comparing the exchange rate between mils and Euros.
Now it looks like I bumped this thread to tell a (sort of) dick joke 
I can’t think of a nobler purpose.
I have a couple of 1,000,000-zaire notes that I got there (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) in 1993, with Mobutu’s picture on them. A the time, one of them was just enough to buy one beer. I believe they became even more devalued later. You know a country’s in trouble when you have to be a millionaire to buy a beer.
When I started working for a bank in the early 2000s, the Turkish lira was the least valuable currency that we had in our system. Wikipedia says it was worth 1/1,350,000 of a US dollar before the new lira (worth 1,000,000 old lira) was issued.
My friend’s sister visited Turkey in the late '90s and she was taking money out of her father’s account via ATM. Her father was ticked off that she was repeatedly taking out small sums (like $20) instead of a small number of larger transactions; she explained that $20 worth of Turkish lira was already an unwieldy stack of bills.