Talk:Commemorative banknotes of the Canadian dollar

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Maybe we should mention radix economy.[edit]

For better or worse, Canada used Decimal (Base10). For making purchases easier, we use pseudo binary (Base2) for making additional denominations:

Splitting:

  • 100.00
  • 050.00
  • 025.00
  • 010.00
  • 005.00
  • 002.00
  • 001.00
  • 000.50
  • 000.25
  • 000.10
  • 000.05
  • 000.02
  • 000.01

Lumping:

  • 000.01
  • 000.02
  • 000.05
  • 000.10
  • 000.20
  • 000.50
  • 001.00
  • 002.00
  • 005.00
  • 010.00
  • 020.00
  • 050.00
  • 100.00

Personally, I prefer splitting with the 025.00 and the 000.25 myself, but that is only my personal preference. The 025.00 banknote is an example of splitting.

Pseudo binary works well, but is not best. What we want to do is minimize the product of the number of demonizations times the number of tokens exchanged during each transaction. This is called radix economy. The number with the lowest radix economy is e. Since e is a transcendental number we use 3 instead, thus ending up with pseudoternary:

  • 100.00
  • 030.00
  • 010.00
  • 003.00
  • 001.00
  • 000.30
  • 000.10
  • 000.03
  • 000.01

Lumping and splitting generate the same Decimal (Base10) denominations. Maybe, we should comment in the article that 025.00 is a good denomination, bet it would be more efficient to change the way one generates denominations to pseudoternary. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.102.233.65 (talk) 12:56, 25 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]