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

Which currency, whose name comes from the Latin word for a pound weight, had six zeros struck from it in 2005, was briefly renamed the new version of itself, and then lost most of its value again in the early 2020s?

Question 3

Which currency was introduced as electronic book money in 1999 and as notes and coins in 2002, is now used by twenty European Union countries after Croatia joined in 2023, and is managed from Frankfurt by a central bank whose sole legal priority is stable prices?

Question 4

What is the name for the monetary principle, usually stated as bad money drives out good, meaning that when two kinds of money must be accepted at the same face value, people spend the one worth less as metal and hoard or melt the one worth more?

Question 5

What is the name for the decision by the chairman of the United States central bank at the end of the 1970s to push short-term interest rates up toward twenty per cent in order to break a decade of entrenched double-digit inflation, even at the cost of a deep recession?

Question 6

Which currency accounts for well over half of the world's foreign-exchange reserves and one side of most currency trades, and takes its name from a silver coin once minted in a Bohemian valley?

Question 7

Which cryptocurrency was created in 2013 as a joke, built around an internet picture of a Shiba Inu dog captioned in broken English, with no cap on its supply and no serious purpose, yet grew at times to a market value in the tens of billions of dollars?

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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.