I recently bought a couple 100 trillion dollar Zimbabwean dollars, was curious if there was anything similar for coins(e.g. coins you would think are very valuable by their appearance but because of inflation or other reasons are not).
I'm curious about that myself. I would guess that, in times of hyperinflation, it's much quicker and easier to issue newly-denominated paper than newly-denominated coins.
After World War II, Hungary and Greece both had much worse inflation than Zimbabwe. Not sure whether their worthless money was minted or printed, I suspect the latter, it's easier and cheaper.
My 2 highest denomination coins.....Hamburg...1/2 million (500,000) mark and Turkey...7,500,000 lira and Turkey..7,500,000 lira
Westphalia in Germany in 1923 as part of the notgeld issues coined a 1 billion Mark coin. (two varieties) and their billion is our trillion. (They have millions, milliards, then billions. That may not hold true for these though as they never issued any milliard denominated coins. So these could be just 1 billion marks.)
Here's a relevant article: http://news.yahoo.com/currency-dies-zimbabweans-5-175-quadrillion-local-dollars-153844646.html
Another way to approach this question is to ask what circulating coins in the world today have the highest actual value (i.e. in USD per current exchange rate). The Japanese 500 yen and Swiss 5 frank come to mind as both are worth about 5 dollars and are normal circulating coins. I still remember my experience many years ago buying an entire meal at a Tokyo McDonald's with a single coin. Does anyone know of any others?
Right, but that would still be 1 trillion in the "short scale" system. The Westfalen pieces were fundraisers and not used as money, so a denomination "gap" did not actually matter much. Christian
Canada ... or maybe Australia? This one weighs 1 ton (1,000 kilos), see http://www.1tonnegoldcoin.com
