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A Ten Trillion Zimdollar Bill auctioned for charity
01 Nov 2014 at 09:33hrs | Views
The auction sales platform Cryptothrift announced the sale of a ten trillion dollar Zimbabwean reserve note whose gains will be fully donated to the anti-sexual violence charity RAINN.
This is the unusual auction taking place on the Australian marketplace CryptoShrift.com, which features an auction sales system similar to its competitor Ebay. The item has been submitted by Bitcoin Magazine's Chris DeRose who had the opportunity to get the bill autographed by the famous activist Andreas Antonopoulos at the conference Coins in the Kingdom, which took place in early October.
Such incredible face value is a poignant witness to the utility that Bitcoin is currently representing against traditional currencies that remain under the control of political authorities, with all the inconvenience this leads to.
Zimbabwe, at the turn of 2006, was experiencing a dramatic situation under the presidency of Robert Mugabe, in office since 31 December 1987. The statement is chilling: a dramatic annual hyperinflation, four out of five adults unemployed, empty shops, frequent food and energy shortages while life expectancy had plummeted to 36. Zimbabwe was the only country in the world where toilet paper was more expensive than a bank note.
Inflation for the single month of March 2007 was about 2200%. This means that if you deposited your salary on March in a bank account, its value would have been divided by 22 the following month. In August 2007, two liters of cooking oil costed 400,000 Zimbabwean dollars or about USD 2.8.
In January 2008, the annual inflation rate reached a record 100,580%, while the unemployment rate approached 80%. The Zimbabwean dollar had lost so much of its value that exchanges were most often conducted in South African Rand, Botswana Pula or the US Dollar. A few months later, during the month of July 2008, the annual inflation rate reached 231 million percent, threatening the country with bankruptcy.
Faced with the most unprecedented inflation in human history and the failure of all the options, wackiest of which was to make inflation illegal by decree, the use of the US dollar was imposed on the beginning of 2009 to take advantage of the relative stability of the North American currency. Some sources even suggested that, for certain transactions (real estate, vehicles, finance …), computer systems were no longer able to manage these large numbers.
The auction for this note at the time of writing this article has reached 0.453 BTC, a little over 156 - US - dollars. The proceeds of this sale will be donated to RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), an American anti-sexual violence organization, in accordance with the wishes expressed by Mr. Antonopoulos.
This is the unusual auction taking place on the Australian marketplace CryptoShrift.com, which features an auction sales system similar to its competitor Ebay. The item has been submitted by Bitcoin Magazine's Chris DeRose who had the opportunity to get the bill autographed by the famous activist Andreas Antonopoulos at the conference Coins in the Kingdom, which took place in early October.
Such incredible face value is a poignant witness to the utility that Bitcoin is currently representing against traditional currencies that remain under the control of political authorities, with all the inconvenience this leads to.
Zimbabwe, at the turn of 2006, was experiencing a dramatic situation under the presidency of Robert Mugabe, in office since 31 December 1987. The statement is chilling: a dramatic annual hyperinflation, four out of five adults unemployed, empty shops, frequent food and energy shortages while life expectancy had plummeted to 36. Zimbabwe was the only country in the world where toilet paper was more expensive than a bank note.
In January 2008, the annual inflation rate reached a record 100,580%, while the unemployment rate approached 80%. The Zimbabwean dollar had lost so much of its value that exchanges were most often conducted in South African Rand, Botswana Pula or the US Dollar. A few months later, during the month of July 2008, the annual inflation rate reached 231 million percent, threatening the country with bankruptcy.
Faced with the most unprecedented inflation in human history and the failure of all the options, wackiest of which was to make inflation illegal by decree, the use of the US dollar was imposed on the beginning of 2009 to take advantage of the relative stability of the North American currency. Some sources even suggested that, for certain transactions (real estate, vehicles, finance …), computer systems were no longer able to manage these large numbers.
The auction for this note at the time of writing this article has reached 0.453 BTC, a little over 156 - US - dollars. The proceeds of this sale will be donated to RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), an American anti-sexual violence organization, in accordance with the wishes expressed by Mr. Antonopoulos.
Source - www.cryptocoinsnews.com
