Forrest wrote:About how much is the metal in a typical precious-metal coin of antiquity worth in today's fiat currency (e.g. USD)? Would someone from the distant past be shocked at how much silver it took to buy a loaf of bread, or how little? Or not shocked at all because bread-to-silver ratios are still comparable?
An excellent question!
As of today, silver is $16.43/troy ounce, or 52 cents/gram. Assuming close to pure silver content, a Carolingian/British penny would be worth 80 cents -- not far even in the countries where "less than $1/day" is the poverty measure. A 4.5 gram denarius would be $2.34, still not much -- then again, the past was kind of poor, so maybe that first the subsistence level of the poorest parts of the world. But it would barely buy a loaf of bread in the US today.
OTOH, the Americas had a *lot* of silver. At 3x the value, we'd be talking $2.40 for the small penny, $6.90 for the big one. So still pretty expensive for US bread. Is 3x the right modifier? No idea.
I visited the Soviet Union a bit before it fell. In Estonia, bread in the market by our hotel sold for 2 rubles, but the black market exchange rate was 30 rubles to the dollar. (Even the official one was 6 to the dollar, so that's like 33 cents for a loaf.) I have no idea about bread price variation otherwise; grain is easily traded, but a lot of the price of a loaf will be local labor and retail costs.
He might have. By programmers I thought he meant game programmers but that could apply to both formats.
'Programmers' wouldn't work for TTRPGs, but he said 'developers', which does.
4.5 grams of gold today is worth $190; at a 10:1 value ratio, that would make the same weight of silver $19, which is getting respectable if you expect bread to be 1/8 of daily wage.
So to answer your question, I think they'd be shocked at how much silver it took to buy bread, but our silver is cheaper than theirs was -- we have a lot, and we're not using it as money anymore. Gold is probably more in line with what they'd expect.