Re-Introducing The $5 And $10 Coin

Are we talking about the same coin? It's about SBA-sized. As for counterfeiting, it's as good as it gets (slanted reeding, lateral image, micro-printing) with security - the CHF5 coin is even better because of its excuse edge lettering. I would not be surprised if the U.S. Mint managed to come up with even better security features, especially in the bimetallic and polygonal form.

Slightly large coins also offer more space for the designs, which I think we would all appreciate. The current presidential lineup is boring and this is also an opportunity for change and excitement.

Also, how much harm is it to put coins in your pocket? Do they chafe? Do you walk off-balance? Try carrying a dozen quarters one day and 6 halves the next (and not many circulating coins today exceed the size of the American half), see if there's any noticeable difference between the two. The "difficult to carry" argument has been thoroughly discredited in any country where the coins come bigger than U.S. quarters.

I think the main issue is that 90% of Americans can't be bothered to make a trip to the coin jar to get change before they head out shopping. Sure, it's not much of a hassle to carry around a few coins, but why bother getting those coins if they aren't already in your pocket? It's much easier to just break a $100 or $20 on your first transaction and use that change until you change pants.

Also a few other things to consider from a former cashier:

1. Bills are difficult to swipe from a cash till without being caught on camera. A little sleight of hand can remove a coin without being noticed. At my old work, cashiers would "borrow" quarters to get a snack from the vending machine all the time. My old work would give cashiers a +/- $10 per day; $30 per week window of error before a write-up would be issued.

2. Going off of the above, I can't tell you how many times I had a customer drop a quarter and lose it under lord knows where. Standard procedure was to just give them another one if you saw it was an accident. Imagine if you learned how to drop a $10 coin in a way that you could control where it rolled so another person could pick it up before the cashier found it.

3. Most cashiers don't know the security features of American paper money. We were instructed to only check $50 and $100. As previously stated, even if state-of-the art anti-counterfeiting measures were used on these coins, most simply wouldn't check them. As an example, one of my friends asked me to take a look at his coin collection several years ago to see if there was anything valuable. He had 3 1980-something British pound coins--of those, two were counterfeit. He had no idea and didn't think to check that the edge lettering was literally scratched in by hand.

I was wrong, you people are right. I grabbed a 500 yen coin and placed it over an SBA and they are nearly identical in size.

I just had a bad experience with the coins while over there I guess. I just remember everything needing 100 or 500 yen coins and it was annoying, but whatever.

I'm all for high value coins

And just think of all the fun counterfeiters would have making a coin that is difficult to figure out if real or not. They are flooding the World with fake Silver Dollars so imagine fake $5, $10 or more coins.
However, with inflation the way it is, the $5 coin would be good for gun ball machines soon.

I like where this is going.

Still not going to happen though.

They need to force the $1 coin into use before trying anything else. Coins are easily misplaced so people need to get used to using $ coins to begin with and learn to be more responsible with coins before we try $5 or $10 again. Like a $10 bill blowing out of your hand with a gust of wind, that $10 coin rolling behind some shelf thing at a store would not be fun.