What’s up everyone, how’s month 11 of your three-week quarantine going?
I’ve been back in Portland since October and frankly I feel like I’m under the dome
from the Simpsons movie.
Now perhaps this is not surprising, but I love to travel
(at least when the world’s not ending) and one thing I like to do when visiting a
new country is to collect some of their currency,
both in the bills displayed on my bedroom wall,
and the coins in this well over two kilogram bag
of foreign coins from my and my late grandpa Jim’s travels.
It’s been sitting there in my bedroom just teasing me with its pure intrigue and its
worldly secrets, what are your foreign secrets already?!
Currencies can teach us quite a lot about their country of origin,
but when I got this bag out for a joke in my previous video
on the history of money, one thought came to mind:
when you convert everything to US Dollars or Euros,
how much money is in this massive bag of coins?
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So, if you‘ve seen my previous video and/or follow me on Twitter or Instagram
and/or are a member of the KhAnubis Discord Server,
you are probably familiar with this bag.
So this bag, as if proving the point of that joke, is really heavy.
Turns out, it actually weighs about 2.18 kilograms, which by the way for anyone not familiar with
the metric system, an easy way to know what this means is to
simply… learn the metric system.
So in order to determine how much money is in here,
first we‘ll need to organize everything by currency and by value.
Now we can’t just look up how much 2.18 kg of silver or copper or zinc is worth,
first off because this bag contains a whole mishmash of different metals
(frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these coins had uranium),
but also a coin doesn’t use the amount of metals that it’s worth,
perhaps the most famous instance of this is the US penny
which is worth 1 USD cent, but is made with more than a cent’s worth
of copper and zinc.
Which really just means that the US government is just wasting money on these stupid things.
I will be calculating the value of these coins by the way into US Dollars and Euros,
because they‘re the two most widely traded currencies,
the two currencies I‘ve personally used the most,
and likely the two currencies most of my audience will be familiar with.
Now with the actual sorting of course, first we’ll have to start with what currency
they all belong to, so I’m just gonna organize this big pile into some little piles.
Now what I‘m doing here is pretty self explanatory, I’m just splitting the pile up and organizing
the coins purely by currency, mainly so I could know beforehand exactly
what currencies I would be dealing with.
Currencies also tell you a lot about a country and its government‘s priorities,
and not just like how Australia’s coins might have platypuses and echidnas on them.
For example, according to the book Coined by Kabir Sehgal,
in the ancient and medieval eras, you could tell by the thickness of their coins
if a kingdom was preparing for something like a war,
and therefore needed to put more metals into making weapons than making coins,
and you could tell whether or not the ruler cared about their people‘s education
by how detailed and ornate the decorations were,
especially if they had writing on them.
(Keep in mind not everyone was literate back then)
Now I don‘t have any ancient coins here, but I do have a few currencies that are no
longer in use, namely French francs and German marks.
As cool as they are to have, as they have been ditched in favor of the Euro,
it won’t exactly be as easy to convert these into other currencies, at least with their
value in 2021.
However, when these countries transitioned to the Euro,
they didn‘t just flip a switch and tell everyone to exchange their life savings for
Euros, because that would have resulted in mayhem,
but rather these currencies had their values tied to that of the Euro.
On New Year’s 1999 the French franc and German mark had their values tied to the Euro,
with one Euro equaling 6.55957 francs and 1.95583 marks.
Should I maybe make a video about this whole thing?
So as you can see here, I’ve got these coins all separated by currency,
so I have Australian Dollars, Canadian Dollars, Cayman Island Dollars,
Danish krone, a lot of Euros, French francs, German marks, Hong Kong Dollars, Macanese
pataca, Malaysian Ringgit, Polish złoty, Singapore
Dollars, South Korean won, Swedish krona,
this one Swiss franc coin I found in a bar on Warschauer Straße in Berlin,
Turkish lira, Thai baht, British Pounds, US Dollars,
and some old trolley and parking tokens.
Now what we gotta do is count up and organize the coins by number,
so that we can know exactly how much is in each of these little mini-piles…
this is going to take a bit as well, so I’m just going to talk about more facts
while I timelapse this, but I’ll provide you all a different angle.
For this step one thing I did was stack the coins by value,
since I couldn’t just collect one of each like a normal person,
and also *some* shops in Germany seem to love not pricing things in whole numbers,
which means I’ve ended up with a crap-ton of 1, 2, and 5-Euro cent coins,
which also look a lot like smaller British and American coins,
so I ended up finding a lot of extra Euros in those piles.
I swear most of the lost change I find around the basement is Euros at this point.
Also, you might be wondering why I have so many US Dollar coins in this collection
if both I and my grandfather grew up in the US?
Shouldn‘t I be… using them?
Well yeah, but also different states tend to have different custom designs on the tails
side of quarters, for example this Oregon quarter with Crater
Lake, or this West Virginia quarter with John Brown’s
fort in Harper’s Ferry, or this Connecticut quarter with a big-ass
oak tree, or this Maine quarter with a… oh very original,
a lighthouse.
They also do this with the Euro for the countries, as you can see here with France, Spain,
the German state of Niedersachsen, and this commemorative coin celebrating the
30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Finally we got them all sorted out… god that took a long time.
Except no, for I have deceived you (*dab*)
this only took about 20 or 30 minutes, but as a joke I decided to film this a few days
afterward so my facial hair would grow out so it would
look like this took a long time.
You probably didn't even notice, did you?
Let’s get back to where we actually were.
Okay, so now we have them all organized by currency,
and furthermore by value.
So now for the conversion, for this step I just…
looked it up on Google, it wasn’t that hard, and for the francs and marks I simply took
whatever amount I had and divided it by its exchange rate to the Euro,
just kind of… assuming it would have gone up with inflation.
So we’ve got 0.25 Australian Dollar cents, 19 Canadian dollars and 80 cents,
2 Cayman Island dollars and 76 cents, 14 Danish krone,
17 Euros 60 cents, 27 French franc 10 centimes, 4 German marks and 15 pfennig,
5 Hong Kong dollars and 30 cents or 3 hòu, 5 Macanese pataca 90 avos,
1 Malaysian ringgit 40 sen, 4 Polish złoty and 1 grosz,
3 Singapore dollars, 500 South Korean won, 3 Swedish krona,
5 Swiss centimes, 13 Turkish lira 60 kuruş, 2 Thai baht,
15 pounds 81 pence, and 16 US dollars 20 cents.
And now, adding those all together with equivalent values as of 16.Jan.2021,
all this equals… [slaps keyboard]
I actually already looked it up a couple days ago actually,
$95.68, or 79.18€, so shoutout to @luka_sandic on Instagram,
whose vague guess of $70-80 was actually the closest…
and yeah I’m gonna go to the bank real quick...
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