“One of the more intractable problems facing historians is that of translating the value of money over time. What was an 1869 dollar worth in today’s terms?

All too often this has been handled as though it were nothing more than a matter of inflation and the reader is advised simply to multiply antique monetary sums by a given factor. This might have worked well enough in the pre-industrial era, but the coming of the steam engine greatly exacerbated the difficulty of comparison.

Essentially, the Industrial Revolution introduced three new problems for historians. The first is rapidly rising real wealth…

The second problem is that while many commodities have remained stable in terms of the percentage of real income that they cost, they have become much cheaper in other economic terms, such as time….

The third problem is that technologies serving the same function at different times often cannot be readily compared…”

-A Note on Money and Time from John Steele Gordon’s Scarlet Woman of Wall Street

Something tells me #Bitcoin will make it easier for historians to perform historical economic analysis.