Beyond Bitcoin: The Curious History of Currencies That Flopped

The quest for a reliable medium of exchange is as old as civilisation itself, and history is littered with currencies that failed to stand the test of time. Long before paper money or Bitcoin, societies experimented with a dazzling array of objects as currency. Salt was a staple of trade in ancient Rome (and from where we get the word ‘salary’), squirrel pelts served as money in medieval Russia and Scandinavia, and dolphin teeth were used in the Solomon Islands. Un-brie-lievably, wheels of Parmesan cheese held value in Italy, cocoa beans fuelled commerce in Mesoamerica, and the massive stone rai of Micronesia became symbols of wealth and status.

Yet despite their ingenuity, these early forms of money often flopped due to problems like perishability, difficulty in transport, limited divisibility, or vulnerability to counterfeiting and environmental change, making them unsustainable as economies grew more complex.

Modern currencies, though more sophisticated, have also experienced dramatic collapses, and some of the most high-profile currency failures in history serve as cautionary tales.

These stories about money mayhem, collapsed currencies, and financial folly didn’t make cents then, and they don’t make cents now. When will the penny drop? Let’s find out.

On 18 May 2010, a Florida-based software developer posted this message on one of the early cryptocurrency forums –

I’ll pay 10,000 bitcoins for a couple of pizzas…like maybe two large ones so I have some left over for the next day. I like having leftover pizza to nibble on later. You can make the pizza yourself and bring it to my house or order it for me from a delivery place, but what I’m aiming for is getting food delivered in exchange for bitcoins where I don’t have to order or prepare it myself, kind of like ordering a ‘breakfast platter’ at a hotel or something, they just bring you something to eat and you’re happy!

I like things like onions, peppers, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, pepperoni etc., just standard stuff, no weird fish topping or anything like that. I also like regular cheese pizza which may be cheaper to prepare or otherwise acquire.

If you’re interested, please let me know and we can work out a deal.

Four days later, the transaction was put into motion and Papa John’s delivered two large pizzas. On that day, one Bitcoin was worth $0.004, so 10,000 was worth $40.

Bitcoin Pizza Day, as it has become known, marked the first publicly-identified real-world transaction using Bitcoin, and has become a legendary milestone in the cryptocurrency community, symbolising Bitcoin’s leap from a niche digital experiment to a medium of exchange with real-world value.

At the time of writing (May 2025), those same 10,000 Bitcoin would be worth around one billion dollars, or roughly seven hundred and eighty million pounds.

While this is a great story, today Bitcoin has largely failed as a currency because it’s slow, expensive to use, and extremely volatile, making it impractical for everyday transactions and unreliable as a stable medium of exchange.

However, it has succeeded as an investment because its capped supply, growing demand, and dramatic price fluctuations have attracted speculators and institutional investors seeking high returns.

But as to people using it to just order their pizza? Unlikely in the extreme. Here are a few more examples of strange or troubled currencies that ultimately flopped.

Back in medieval Italy, massive wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano – yep, that’s the Parmesan cheese we grate on pasta today – weren’t just prized for their bold, nutty flavour. They were also surprisingly valuable. So valuable, in fact, that they doubled as a kind of currency. Thanks to their long shelf life and consistent demand, these hefty cheese wheels became a reliable way to store wealth and even trade for goods and services.

But as handy as cheese-money sounds, it’s time as a go-to payment method eventually faded. For one, even a tough, long-lasting cheese is still, well, cheese – not exactly as durable as coins or paper money. Plus, lugging around 36-kilogram cheese wheels isn’t exactly ideal for popping to the market.

Still, the idea never completely vanished. Since 1953, a bank in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region – Credito Emiliano – has kept the tradition alive in a modern twist. They actually accept Parmesan wheels as collateral for loans. Deep in their climate-controlled, high-security vaults, the bank safeguards some 430,000 wheels while local cheese makers wait out the slow, two-year aging process needed to reach peak flavour (and value). Each wheel is worth around €300 and is carefully tracked and maintained by the bank.

You can find them on beaches all over the world – chances are you’ve got some at home from the last holiday you went on – but would you believe cowrie shells were once among the most widely used forms of money in the world. For centuries, they served as currency across Africa, Asia, and even parts of Europe and the Pacific.

They were so popular because they were durable, easy to carry, and impossible to forge. In West Africa, cowries became so integral to the economy that prices for goods, taxes, and even fines were listed in shells. They were also used in ancient China and India, sometimes strung together in long chains for larger transactions. Over time however, as trade expanded and metal coins became more practical and harder to counterfeit, cowrie shells faded from use as money.

Known as the Land of Stone Money, Yap is in the Federated States of Micronesia. It’s in the western Pacific Ocean around 1,500 kilometres east of The Philippines. It’s on this tiny island where you’ll find some of the world’s most remarkable coins, once the backbone of the island’s economy – the Rai stones. These disk-shaped stones – some as small as three centimetres in diameter, others almost four metres in diameter and weighing four tonnes – were quarried from distant islands and transported back to Yap, a feat that made them both valuable and symbolic.

Ownership of a Rai stone could be transferred without the stone ever moving, often just by a public declaration, making them a unique form of currency. Rai stones were used to settle debts, pay dowries, and mark important transactions. Their value depended not just on how big they were, but also on their history and how difficult it was to get it to Yap. However, with the arrival of Western money and changes in trade, Rai stones gradually lost their role as everyday currency.

The assignat was a type of paper money introduced in France in 1789, created to help solve the country’s financial problems during the French Revolution. Assignats began as certificates backed by land seized by the government from the church and the crown, which holders could then use to buy those newly nationalised properties. Later, they were turned into regular money to help with a shortage of coins and to stimulate the economy.

While the early impact was positive, widespread distrust of paper money, political turmoil, and the outbreak of war quickly eroded confidence. The government kept printing more assignats to pay increasing debts, which led to rapid inflation, counterfeiting, and a catastrophic collapse in value. By 1796, assignats became almost worthless, leading to one of history’s most famous cases of money losing its value due to hyperinflation.

Continental Currency, commonly called “Continentals,” was paper money issued by the Continental Congress starting in 1775 to fund the American Revolutionary War. Lacking gold or silver reserves, Congress printed these notes in large quantities, hoping future tax revenues would support their value.

At first, Continentals helped the colonies pay soldiers and suppliers, but the government quickly lost control over how much was in circulation. With no backing by tangible assets and little coordination between Congress and the states – who also printed their own notes – the market was soon flooded with paper money. Counterfeiting further eroded trust, and as a result, the value of Continentals plummeted, leading to runaway inflation.

By the end of the war, the notes were nearly worthless, giving rise to the phrase “not worth a continental.” This failure left the new nation wary of paper money for decades and directly influenced the creation of a stable, coin-based American dollar after the war.

The Papiermark was the paper currency of the Weimar Republic in Germany, most infamous for its catastrophic hyperinflation between 1921 and 1923.

After World War I, Germany was saddled with massive war debts and harsh reparations imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, while its economy struggled with lost territories and industrial output. To meet these obligations the Weimar government resorted to printing vast amounts of unbacked Papiermarks. This uncontrolled money printing, combined with a shortage of goods and a collapse in public confidence, caused prices to spiral out of control. A loaf of bread that cost 250 marks in January 1923 soared to 200 billion marks by November that year. Ordinary Germans saw their life savings wiped out, wages became worthless within hours, and everyday items became unaffordable.

There are famous images of children playing with huge piles of worthless banknotes, and it was a crisis which devastated the middle class, fuelled political extremism, and undermined faith in democracy. The Papiermark was eventually replaced by the Rentenmark in late 1923, but the damage to German society and the government lasted years.

The Greek drachma experienced one of the worst examples of hyperinflation in history during the 1940s. Before World War II, Greece’s finances were relatively stable, but the occupation by Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria devastated the economy. The occupiers plundered Greek resources and forced the government to print massive amounts of money to pay occupation costs, while also flooding the market with their own currencies.

With goods scarce, public confidence collapsed, and people turned to bartering or using gold instead of drachmas. Inflation became uncontrollable, and by October 1944, prices were doubling every few days, and notes as large as 100 trillion drachma were issued. The drachma’s value was ultimately destroyed, wiping out savings and forcing Greeks to abandon the currency for everyday transactions. Hyperinflation only ended after the war, when the drachma was replaced at a rate of 50 billion old drachma to one new drachma.

The Chinese yuan suffered a devastating episode of hyperinflation in the 1940s, especially during and after World War II and throughout the Chinese Civil War. The Nationalist government issued large amounts of unbacked paper money to finance military expenses and government deficits, first during the war against Japan and then in the struggle with the Communists.

As the government kept printing more currency to cover its growing budget shortfalls, prices began to soar – wholesale prices in Shanghai increased fivefold from late 1945 to early 1946, and then thirtyfold the following year. By 1949, the price of everyday goods had risen by trillions of times compared to prewar levels, and people increasingly abandoned the yuan in favour of bartering or using foreign currency and precious metals. Efforts to stabilise the currency failed, and the resulting economic chaos eroded public confidence in the Nationalist regime and paved the way for the Communist victory in 1949.

The Hungarian pengő holds the record for the worst hyperinflation in history, collapsing spectacularly in the aftermath of World War II. Introduced in 1927 to replace the kronen, the pengő initially brought some stability, but Hungary’s economy was devastated by the war. Production facilities were destroyed, infrastructure was in ruins, and the country was burdened with massive reparations to the Soviet Union.

To cover these costs and rebuild, the government resorted to printing ever-increasing amounts of pengő, flooding the economy with paper money. By mid-1946, prices were doubling every fifteen hours, and monthly inflation peaked at an unimaginable 41.9 quadrillion (41,900,000,000,000,000) percent. Banknotes reached denominations as high as 100 quintillion (100,000,000,000,000,000,000) pengő, and even special “adópengő” tax notes were introduced in a failed attempt to slow the crisis. The currency became so worthless that people used it as scrap paper, and bartering replaced money in daily life.

In August 1946, Hungary replaced the pengő with the forint at a rate of 400 octillion (400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pengő to one forint, ending the world’s most extreme case of currency collapse.

The Argentine austral was introduced in June 1985 as part of a government plan to tackle runaway inflation, replacing the previous peso argentino at a rate of one austral to 1,000 pesos. The new currency, divided into 100 centavos, was launched with hopes of stabilising Argentina’s economy and restoring confidence. However, inflation soon surged again due to persistent government overspending, lack of fiscal discipline, and a loss of public trust in monetary policy.

The government printed increasingly larger denominations – eventually up to ₳500,000 notes – to keep up with skyrocketing prices, but this only fuelled further hyperinflation. By 1991, the austral had lost nearly all its value, and daily life was dominated by price hikes and economic uncertainty. In 1992, the austral was replaced by the convertible peso at a rate of 10,000 australes to one peso.

The Zimbabwe dollar, introduced in 1980 to replace the Rhodesian dollar, became infamous for one of the worst cases of hyperinflation in modern history. Initially, it was valued higher than the US dollar, but decades of economic mismanagement, corruption, and controversial land reforms eroded trust and crippled the economy, especially from the late 1990s onward. To finance growing deficits and declining production, the government printed ever-larger quantities of money, causing inflation to spiral out of control.

By November 2008, monthly inflation peaked at an estimated 79.6 billion percent, with prices doubling daily and a $100 trillion note not enough to buy basic goods. As the currency collapsed, people abandoned the Zimbabwe dollar in favour of bartering or using foreign currencies such as the US dollar and South African rand, and by 2009, the government officially abandoned its currency altogether. The failure of the Zimbabwe dollar devastated savings, destroyed economic stability, and left a lasting legacy of mistrust in the country’s monetary system.