denominators

[Dylan Paul Thurston]

On Sat, Jul 08, 2000 at 10:36:26AM -0500, Christopher Browne wrote:
> On Sat, 08 Jul 2000 10:17:52 EST, the world broke into rejoicing as
> Richard Wackerbarth <rkw@dataplex.net>  said:
> > Although this is functional, I object to re-denomination because
> > the auditors want the ledger to match the original transaction
> > documents.
> >
> > Once an entry is properly entered, that entry should never change.
> 
> The thing that would legitimately need to change would be the name of
> the currency.
> 
> Supposing, for instance, the Fed decides that the US Dollar has inflated
> too much, and that they need to issue "new dollars" in a 1:100 ratio
> for the old ones.  That is, for $100 of "old" currency, or "old"
> balances, you get $1 in the "new, improved" version.
> ...
> In that case, it is likely that we want to rename all the "old"
> occurances from being "USD" to being "USD.old" or some such thing,
> as _new_ references should reference the commodity as it exists today.

One way to take care of this without changing old transactions (which
could be a royal pain; what if they're in different files?) would be
to include the date of creation of each currency.  Thus, after the
crash caused by the start of the new millenium, one "USD_20010101"
would be worth 100 "USD_Epoch".

(I don't like including the date in a character string like this.)

--Dylan Thurston