From the time of Emperor Philip the Arab (244 AD to 249 AD), the system of fixed exchange broke down. Every day, commercial activity became more difficult because of the variable rate of exchange. The equivalent effect would be if ten one-dollar bills were worth a ten-dollar bill one day then a five-dollar bill the next. Citizens no longer knew the value of their money. Economic activity declined.
This was a dramatic fall from grace for the world’s first government-controlled currency, which had been in use to pay for goods from Britannia to Judaea to Africa Proconsularis.
Unlike their Roman forebears, digital currencies have offered the citizens of Venezuela an innovative solution. They can circumvent the bolívar by adopting cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ether, Dash (DASH) and EOS (EOS), to the extent that the government introduced its own, the petro, in 2018. Iran is hoping to use the profits from a booming cryptocurrency mining sector to bolster its economy while still under siege from United States sanctions.