Comment by quantified
4 hours ago
When the US attempted to transition to the metric system, gas stations raised their prices per unit volume and the American consumer was convinced that the metric system was bad. I have family that think metric is bad because some fringe people thought there should be 10 hours in a day and 100 minutes in an hour, also something like 10 months a year, and the whole thing is bad because some awkward ideas were floated.
Here, it's a question of resolution, with a proven history that transitions screw the consumer, though maybe it won't be so. We're ok with arbitrary hundredths of a dollar, why were we not at thousandths? The American half cent disappeared a long time ago. You still need to include the cents in a tax bill that runs into the millions of dollars.
It's just an awkward stage in inflation. Eventually a US dollar will be worth what a Zimbabwean dollar was, and we won't have $100 bills anymore.
During the French Revolution, they tried to make a right angle have 100 degrees and even recomputed all new trig tables for this new standard. It obviously did not catch on :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian
There's no reason you can't have 400 degrees in a circle and therefore 100 for a right angle.
It's a degree scale: you can choose any number you want.
Indeed, gradiens are a scale where a circle is divided into 400 equal parts. Really fucked me up a few times when I got a new calculator and wasn’t paying attention to what the little “grad” meant.
But I can't subdivide 400 in to as many ways as 360. Think about the pie industry. They could be put out of business!!
Of course that's true, that doesn't mean you should.
The Indiana pi bill mandated certain mathematical values be changed to the wrong value.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
“The bill, written by a physician and an amateur mathematician, never became law.”
Whenever I'm late to a meeting I blame it on the french revolutionary calendar.
> You still need to include the cents in a tax bill that runs into the millions of dollars
Not in all cases. The IRS does not use cents when you file your tax return, they say round to the nearest dollar.
It used to be that they gave you the choice. You could round or you could use pennies but you had to be consistent throughout the return, because even the IRS doesn’t care if you manage to scrape out 49 cents.
Has that changed and it has to be dollars now?
>> and we won't have $100 bills anymore.
Heard some pundits on the radio talking about the elimination of the penny and one of them who worked at the Secret Service as an analyst talked about why the US paper money only goes to $100 bills. He said it was to reduce criminals and illicit activity and criminals having to store it.
He related the story of Pablo Escobar's brother or cousin who was the accountant for the cartel. He said they were losing billions of dollars every year because of various kinds of attrition like rats chewing up the money, it getting too wet and disintegrating. They were losing so much because they had to store it and that wasn't always the best because they had so much of it on hand which seemed to lend credence to his story.
So if you were to get rid of the $100 bills that would further erode the ability of criminals to store so much of it.
I'm not really sure about "He said it was to reduce [...] criminals having to store it". Storage shouldn't be a huge problem - IIRC you can pack about a hundred million onto a standard pallet. Even for Escobar, who is THE outlier here, and assuming he's holding 100% of it in cash, that's about 300 pallets which easily fits into a normal warehouse. If you've got that much money it shouldn't be impossible to keep a warehouse like that clean and dry.
Now, "illicit activity" more broadly speaking checks out to me. The EU stopped printing the 500 euro note because it was primarily used for illegal transactions and money laundering.
When the $1000 bill was retired, a loaf of bread cost a couple cents. There was indeed a push to purge them during the drug scares of the late 20th century. A suitcase of $1000 bills is far sexier than one of $100 bills. It really was porting them.
With bitcoin, it's moot.
A $100 is basically a tank of gas and a sandwich in CA.
In 1934 the dollar was worth approximately 24x more than in 2025. A cheap loaf of bread is about $2 here in NYC, so it would be about 8¢ at the time.
On one hand, the difference between 2¢ and 8¢ looks completely inconsequential now. OTOH it's a four-fold difference.
The 500-euro bill is being phased out for similar reasons. Though it's worth noting a 100-dollar bill was worth more than twice what it is today when Pablo Escobar died.
> rats chewing up the money
Profit for the US government. Fixed by plastic bills.
Every $ printed but never redeemed is a significant profit (assuming other costs are low like printing).
Especially yummy when countries just want to hoard the currency - same as selling stamps that are never used:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/1993/460/ifdp460.pd...
I'm pretty sure the OP was talking about a far future where a $100 bill is worth less than the current penny
Though I think the parent means, eventually in the (hopefully) distant future, we'll get rid of the $100 bill because it will be worth too little.
Exactly. Like with the Zimbabwe dollars being printed in billion-dollar denominations, $100 is irrelevant then
Nobody wants 10 months in a year. What we want is 13 28-day months a year plus one or two intercalary days. But organized religion gets in the way.