At one point, toilet paper was cheaper than printing a banknote of the same value

In the second half of the 2010s, Venezuela sank into one of the deepest hyperinflations of the 21st century — prices could climb by hundreds of percent a year, and the local currency, the bolívar, lost value almost by the day.

The twist that went viral around the world: banknotes became so worthless that people literally weighed them in kilograms instead of counting bills for larger purchases, and some crafters started turning them into purses and souvenirs for tourists, because that earned more than spending the notes as money.

The government tried to fix things by "slashing zeros" off the currency in successive monetary reforms — over a few years it introduced a new currency twice, each time wiping several zeros off every price and denomination.

The stakes: this is one of the starkest modern examples that a banknote's value lives neither in its paper nor its ink, only in collective trust in the institution that issues it — once that trust disappears, all that's left is colorful paper.