The Reincarnated Inferior Magic Swordsman - Chapter 9

ANNOYING RANT BELOW, JUST BLOWING OFF STEAM, FEEL FREE TO SKIP

I can’t stand the tendency to make the pseudo-medieval currency match the yen. It is pure nonsense for any pre-modern society to maintain such a worthless currency unit, much less to continue to produce it. They would have had generations to realise that the base currency had lost utility and revise the system, like nations in our world. If it happens faster, the currency just collapses. Only modern phenomena like non-physical banking, paper currency, and unsustainable economic expansion allow Japan to even maintain the fiction that the yen is still a real unit. The actual base unit is now 100 yen, and the yen is a fractional marker, just like the dollar and the penny. And even the USA, by far the richest country and largest economy in history, has decided to quit subsidizing the penny fiction because it is a costly absurdity. The statement “with just 5 silver coins, a commoner can live for a month” is equivalent to saying ‘it only takes 50 thousand base unit coins every month, what a tiny number of coins to earn and spend one by one’. Nobody counts 50000 of anything as part of their monthly routine. It’s very like saying that rice is bought and sold by the grain.

The smallest unit of currency in this economy is the silver coin, and large coppers can be used to make change from a silver. Small coppers don’t exist, because why would anyone calculate the value of half a gram of cooked meat, much less stamp a coin out of a valuable metal to represent that tiny fraction of value.