I agree with Jim here.
I think we don't need to solve all the possible currency problems to have a useful type. I'll reiterate what I think is the key point here:
A currency type should work like a wallet. If I have 20USD in my wallet and I put 20EUR in the wallet, I have 20USD and 20EUR in the wallet, not 42USD (or whatever the conversion rate is these days). If I want to convert those to a single currency, I need to perform an operation.
If we had this as a basic building block, support for some of the major currency formats, and a function that a user could call (think of the way we justify_interval sums of intervals to account for the ambiguities in day lengths and so on), I think we'd have a pretty useful type.
As to Tom's point, conversion rates do not vary with time, they vary with time, space, vendor, whether you're buying or selling, and in what quantity, and so on. We can give people the tools to more easily and accurately execute this math without actually building a whole financial tool suite in the first release.
