interesting calculation, making clear what interest does.  a few observations. ...... the transition to supplementing, supplanting gold and silver coin by paper appears to be a four step process:   introduction of paper currency with gold and silver holdings 1:1.    inflate the number of paper notes on the same amount of gold and silver holdings from 1:1 to 1:10 and beyond (1:10,000). consider that AU and AG (1:16) means that a silver coin of a troy ounce would provide for a day's wages for Joe Sixpack    a debt of 300.000 silver coins ( silver riders) 28 gramms, was enough to entice Charles II to team up with Louis XIV and Bishop of Münster to occupy the creditor Nation of the Republic of the 7 Provinces and extinguish the debt and rob whatever they could lay their hands on. (1672)    add for book keeping purposes others asset classes "underpinning" the currency.   based on bookkeeping move to diminsh the role of precious metals in favor of other assets classes including debt.    inflate debt asset classes while inflating currency, use part of it to suppress price of the PM asset, and allow settlement in paper. And institute a governance framework like Basel I, II, III, where the banks get to decide how certain assetclasses are used to appear to strengthen bank credibility. ( of course failure in stresstesting is suppressed)    Your calculation is based on the premise that never a debt settlement had occured. that premise is only valid after stage 4, meaning the moment of seizure of one specific asset class: gold and silver: 1933 and especially after 1971. In this regard: "keep the oil" is an interesting exclamation.  Another issue in this regard is that 1st century economy does not compare to ours these days. Back then maybe a 100 items were considered life's neccessities, whereas today that may easily have surpassed a 100 fold or 10.000 items.  It is inescapable, with the time consuming ways of the past, a modern, complex, and highly services economy cannot be maintained if it were not for digitized "money", which is represented by the number of units of currency in your bankaccount.