Thread 17993379

Why does Australia as a colonial project by England use dollars $ and not pounds?

>>17993379 (OP)
they switched in 1966 because they wanted a decimalized currency like dollars and cents. Prior to 1971 one pound was made up of 240 pence, with 12 pence to the shilling and 20 shillings to the pound. Why they didn't just decimalize the australian pound instead of renaming their currency to the australian dollar I'm not sure. I guess they thought pounds HAD to be nondecimalized or else people would get confused. Typical cargo cult colonials.

240 has a huge number of factors, can be divided by 1,2,3,4,5,6,8,10,12,15,16,18,20,24,30,40,60,80&120. In comparison, 100 can only be divided by 1,2,5,10,20,25&50. So when most transactions were far less than 1 pound, a base 240 system made more sense as it could be divided more ways. However, as inflation devalued the currency over the 20th century, most transactions were now worth multiple pounds, and so the ability to use smaller divisions like shillings was less valuable, and the benefits of being able to do large sums easily with a decimal system outweighed the value of these smaller divisions. One by one the commonwealth countries adopted decimal currency. Australia was one of the first to make the change. At the time other countries using pounds all used the base 240 system and the terms were considered fairly synonymous. Also, there was a brief intermediary period where the new currency had been released, but a lot of old currency was still in circulation, so it made sense to have different names so the two were not confused. Dollars and cents were the most common decimal terms in the anglophone world, so they used that.