When I was twelve I started my first job. Though I had worked here and there before that, this was the first time I worked on a regular basis at a job. I mowed lawns, both after school and on weekends. I’ve been told my Japanese friends that’s a very America job, so there we go.

Anyway, depending on the yard I made anywhere from $10 to $20. This was 1990. Adjusted for inflation, that is $23.31 to $46.63 in today’s dollar, representing an inflation of 133.1%.

The SNES was released in America the very next year. I saved all the money I made to buy it. I was so excited. Although I had bought games both for my Commodore 64 and NES in the past, this was going to be my first big purchase. Due to that, the price on the receipt stuck in my head all these years. It rang up to exactly $210 after tax (no, I don’t remember the cents amount). That would convert to $469.80 today, an inflation of 123.7%.

I continued mowing lawns, but then when I started high school in 1992 I also began a paper route. Another common American job. With the money from both jobs, I bought several games for the aforementioned SNES. The most expensive of these was Chrono Trigger. It was released in 1995 and cost a staggering $79.99 at the time. In the years since I’ve read that some stores charged even more. SNES games were expensive at the time, but this one was more than most. That would be $159.93 today, an inflation of 99.9%.

heh… and people complain about a $10 iPhone game or $20 Steam game today. Why, back in my day…

Incidentally, I’ve heard from Japanese friends that Chrono Trigger was even more expensive here at release. But I have no info for yen inflation rates, so let’s stick with the dollar here.

It just always strikes me how much value the dollar has lost. I came across an old flyer for McDonalds several weeks ago. It doesn’t have a date, but I’d guess these are prices from the 1950s. The style of the building also looks like 50s. So let’s just take 1959 as a date and price these.

That 15 cent hamburger is $1.57 today and the 10 cent fries would be $1.05 today, both an inflation of 948.1%.

People always complain about greedy management at McDonalds today for the higher than inflation price increases, but I always think size has much more to do with it. A super size serving of french fries is more than double the size of the tiny original serving that didn’t even have a size because it was assumed no one could possibly be able to eat more. The McDonalds website tells me a small hamburger is $2 exactly, so that’s not too far off from where it should be from inflation alone.

Nearly 1000%! Isn’t that just insane? Of course if we go back further, it is even worse. A single silver dollar from one hundred years ago in 1924 would be $17.82 today, an increase of 1681.9%.

I’m always shocked most of all by the pocket change. Today most of us consider change beyond worthless. In 1913, it wasn’t. A penny was worth roughly 31 cents in today’s money, more than a quarter is today. A nickel, $1.54. A dime, $3.08. A quarter, $7.69. A half-dollar, $15.39. An inflation of nearly 3000%. A handful of change back in the day could actually buy you some things!

and could cause more financial pain if you had a hole in your pocket and lost a few coins. Those old cartoons where someone freaks out over losing a coin suddenly make a lot more sense when you consider the value they used to have.

I’m not good enough at these tools to do it, but I’d love if someone could plot the dollar against Bitcoin. What I mean is that when we set the base currency as USD, it looks like BTC just exploded in value over the past several years, but if we set the base currency in BTC, what would the performance of the dollar look like? Down, down, down, down, down. Terrible asset. Should really sell that for a coin that is doing better. From that perspective we can see it’s not really so much that Bitcoin has performed amazingly well, it’s that the dollar has performed so badly.

If you know of a graph like this or can make one, please share in the comments.

I’m sure if someone found me an inflation calculator for the yen, it’d be even worse. Even if we discount the hyperinflation of WWII, the performance since has probably not been too good. But I might be blinded due to the terrible performance of the past few years and my tears as I look at my bank account.

Anyway, I guess the point of this piece is that fiat is really not a great investment. Buy precious metals to secure your wealth, and for investing purposes buy Bitcoin. Wall Street may be in the process of trying to take over BTC and that is sad, but owning it is still a much better place to be than owning dollars or yen (or any fiat).

(P.S., Buy HIVE too!!)

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David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.