Money: Currencies, Coins & Crypto Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the August 1998 emergency in which Russia devalued its currency, defaulted on its domestic government debt and declared a moratorium on payments to foreign creditors, all in the space of a few days?

Question 2

What is the name for the event, built into Bitcoin's code and occurring roughly every four years, that cuts in half the number of new coins awarded for adding a block, steadily slowing the creation of new supply until the fixed maximum is reached around the year 2140?

Question 3

Which currency, in continuous use for more than a thousand years, is the oldest still circulating, takes its symbol from the Latin word for a pound weight, and until 1971 was divided into twenty shillings of twelve pence each?

Question 4

What is the name for the set of measures announced by the United States president in August 1971, the most important of which was to suspend the dollar's convertibility into gold, in effect ending the post-war fixed-rate system and opening the era of floating paper currencies?

Question 5

Which cryptocurrency platform, launched in 2015 by a young programmer, added the ability to run small self-executing programs on its ledger, which made possible tradable tokens, digital collectibles and a whole ecosystem of automated finance?

Question 6

What is the name for the strings and woven belts of polished white and purple shell beads made by the Native American peoples of the north-eastern woodlands, used for trade, for recording treaties and history, and adopted as legal tender by the early Dutch and English colonists for want of coin?

Question 7

What is the name for the financial storm that began in July 1997, when Thailand was forced to abandon its dollar peg and let its currency sink, and the panic spread within months to Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines?

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About Money: Currencies, Coins & Crypto

This quiz is about money itself: the currencies of the world and where their names come from, the long history of coins and banknotes, the monetary systems and agreements that have tied currencies together and pulled them apart, the great hyperinflations and currency crises, the central banks, and the rise of cryptocurrency and digital payments. One hundred questions, each describing a currency, a coin, a system, an episode, an institution or a crypto term, and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. Only world-level material is used.

The first pack is the world's currencies, from the dollar, euro, pound, yen and yuan to the rupee, the rand, the real and the CFA franc, with their symbols and etymologies. The second pack is the history of money: cowrie shells, the first coins of Lydia, Chinese paper money, the Spanish piece of eight, the guinea, Isaac Newton at the Mint, the greenback and the tally stick. The third pack is monetary systems and the 20th century: the gold standard, Bretton Woods, the Nixon Shock, the euro's rules, the exchange-rate mechanism, currency boards and dollarization. The fourth pack is hyperinflations, crises and central banks, from Weimar Germany and post-war Hungary to Zimbabwe, from the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England to the Reserve Bank of India and the 2016 demonetisation. The fifth pack is cryptocurrency and digital money: Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, the blockchain, Ethereum, stablecoins, the collapses of Mt. Gox and FTX and Terra, central-bank digital currencies, and India's instant-payment network.

Indian money runs through the whole quiz rather than sitting in one corner: the rupee and its 2010 symbol, the Reserve Bank of India, the 2016 cancellation of the high notes, the short-lived two-thousand-rupee note, the digital rupee pilot and the instant-payment network that is now the largest of its kind anywhere. Alongside it sit the pieces of eight of the age of sail, the wheelbarrows of banknotes of 1923 Germany, the hundred-quintillion note of 1946 Hungary, and the pizza that cost ten thousand bitcoins.

The wrong answers are always other currencies, systems or terms of the same kind, so a good guess is easily checked. About a quarter of the questions carry a neutral photograph, a trading floor, an exchange building, a container ship, a central bank, chosen because it shows no particular currency and so cannot point to any of the four options. This quiz names the specific things; the idea of money in general, and of fiat money, central banking and hyperinflation as concepts, is covered in the Economics Fundamentals quiz. Names, dates and figures have been checked against standard reference works and were current in early 2026.