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

Question 1

What is the name for the principle in international economics that a country can maintain at most two of the following three things at once: a fixed exchange rate, the free movement of capital across its borders, and a monetary policy set for its own domestic needs?

Question 2

What is the name for the reserve asset and unit of account created by the International Monetary Fund in 1969, whose value is set by a weighted basket of the dollar, euro, yuan, yen and pound, and which member countries can exchange among themselves for hard currency?

Question 3

Which banknote was rushed into circulation in India days after the 2016 cancellation of high-value cash to ease the shortage, then quietly stopped being printed, and was formally withdrawn from circulation by the central bank in 2023, though it remains legal tender and exchangeable?

Question 4

What was the name of the standard coin unit of the ancient Greek world, also used for the earliest lumps of alloy money struck in Lydia, and derived from a word meaning weight or standard?

Question 5

Which currency takes its name from a Sanskrit word for wrought silver, is divided into a hundred paise, and in 2010 received a new symbol, chosen by public competition, that fuses a Devanagari letter with the Roman capital R and a horizontal bar?

Question 6

What served as one of the most widespread forms of money in human history, circulating across Africa, South Asia, China and the Pacific for thousands of years, and surviving as legal currency in parts of Africa into the 20th century?

Question 7

Which banknote did the European Central Bank stop issuing in 2019, on the grounds that its high value made it a favourite for money laundering, tax evasion and organised crime rather than everyday spending?

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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.