[nostromo]

The Titanic was built a bit over 100 years ago for 1.5m pounds -- today that'd buy you a nice London two-bedroom apartment.

I wonder if in 100 years from now, people will casually be talking about their nice (but modest) London two-bedroom apartment they bought for 100m pounds.

[nly]

Peoples perceptions of number sizes don't change quickly. 1 million will still seem like a big number. It's likely at some point we'll have to re-denominate. There will be a 'new Pound' or something that is worth 100 'old Pounds'.

You can see the number phenomenon today. People still talk about "winning £1M on the Lottery" like it'd set them up for a life of luxury. To reasonably replace even a median UK full-time salary for life you're going to need around ~£700K in assets. That leaves £300K for a modest home somewhere outside of London and the South East. One false move with your £1M winnings and you'll end up back in the office. The £ is worth half of what it was in 1994 when the Lottery started.

[duderific]

Or we can make 100 trillion pound notes like in Zimbabwe https://www.cnn.com/2016/05/06/africa/zimbabwe-trillion-doll...

[bennyelv]

It was ZWB (Zimbabwe dollars), but I can see why you would assume "pound" given the country's history. Source: I have one of these notes on my coffee table :) It lives with a $1 bill that was printed only a couple of years before it.

Bad stuff happens when a government gets these things wrong!

[baby]

Or japan. In romania people still say “one million” instead of “one hundred”

[baby]

Interesting. I remember that some Bitcoin people were trying to do the reverse when the price was 1000+ by talking about mBTC instead of BTC. I guess http://bitcoinity.org/markets still does it.

[acdha]

Of course, if you convert that to current value that’s something like £235M at current rates, which seems more plausible (and would have been more like £400M without the self-inflicted damage of Brexit). New cruise ships cost more but they’re also larger and have more amenities, and holding so many more passengers means more expenses for things like furnishings.

[htkibar]

Turkish did that. In my childhood bread was 200.000 liras for example.

About a decade ago they renominated it. "New Turkish Lira" was born, where 1.000.000 Old Lira = 1 Lira.

So as another comment has mentioned, probably that would happen.

[not_math]

The Titanic cost $7.5 million to build, which is $200 million in today's money (as of 2020) [1]. I'm pretty confident this is not the cost of the average flat in London.

[1] https://www.history.com/news/titanic-facts-construction-pass...

[nostromo]

The price was 1.5m pounds, as the ship was not built in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic

[netrus]

Pretty sure the Titanic was paid in GBP -- the 1.5M GBP number is correct, the exchange rate was bit different back than.

https://steemit.com/money/@lixtiklipbalm/exchange-rate-of-br...

[pessimizer]

And when the Titanic cost £1.5M, the average weekly wage in the UK was £5.

[quickthrower2]

/r/whoosh