OK I've finally read enough wikipedia articles to figure it out
silver coins
- real - base unit of Spanish colonial money
- real de a ocho / peso / dollar / piece of eight - 8 reales.
gold coins
- escudo - 16 reales, 2 pesos. I have never heard of this one????
- doblón / doubloon - 32 reales, 4 pesos, 2 escudos. the name comes from being 2 escudos.
Now here's the fun part: the US dollar was originally pegged to the Spanish dollar, both in the modern "everything is pegged to the USD" sense and the fact that they (were meant to) have the same amount of silver in them, and be directly equivalent in transactions.
This means, if you're an "Originalist", you MUST concede:
- dollar coins are literally pieces of eight
- that a quarter is actually just 2 reales
- any amount of money that's in .25c increments can actually be written in terms of real, actually. and vice versa, any number of reales divisible by 2 can be expressed in US money
- 🐱 4 dabloons is 16 dollar
It's what the founders literally wanted 🏴☠️
This took me ten minutes of rereading to figure out but I think I got it