The Antikythera Mechanism

This is a 500 billion Yugosalv Dinar note. 500 billion of of the poor little buggers. How did such an extraordinary thing come to exist? Well, it's certaintly didn't involve Bill Gates immigrating.

It turns out, during an uncertain part of General Tito's state, the currency went through an inflation rate of 5 × 10¹⁵ percent per month (prices double every 16 hours). To me, that seems facinating--because it seems more like an abstract mathematical or distant astronomical oddity. But it's not. It was a real phenonomen arising from a real, practical, human oriented system. This was hardly a one-off event, either. We saw and studied many occurances of hyperinflation during the 20th century.

More details here.

Picture courtesy of the National Bank of Serbia. By the way, current Serbian Dinars are far more reasonably valued.