Like I understand every was priced against the price of gold , but how was like “small change ” worked out would it be a % of a weight of amout of gold bar or something
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>Like I understand every was priced against the price of gold
That’s…not inherently correct.
The currency was redeemable for gold. So one unit of the paper currency was redeemable for a very explicit amount of gold. From there, fractions of that unit of currency were also redeemable for fractions of that core amount of gold. So a quarter was literally just defined to be a quarter of the core amount of gold, and necessarily had to be a quarter of a dollar…so 25% (hence, 25 cents).
Almost no one would actually exchange gold, though, except out in frontier areas where everyone was there to prospect for gold, and those a lot of people had gold on them.
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