Could It Be Possible?!

Yeah, replace the paper, if only long enough to get the coins out of the Fed vaults.

Then tell them banks they cannot return them to the Fed. Ever.

That is pretty much true. After they stopped making the SBA's they had a ton of them in storage. The drawdown from those stored SBA's was between 5 and 6 million coins a month and they went almost exclusively to those cities with large mass transit systems where they were more convenient than paper for use in automatic turnstiles etc just as the tokens had been. It was that monthly drawdown that eventually required the coining of a new small dolar, and the production of the 1999 SBA's when the stockpile ran out before 2000 began. (By law the Sac dollars couldn't be made before 2000, so they had to make a run of 1999 SBA's. And run enough of them so they wouldn't be a rarity/collectors item.)

That same drawdown will eventually eliminate the NA/Presidental dollar stockpile even if they do not stop making dollar notes. They should be all gone sometime around 2032.

Our local post office used to have a stamp machine, and if you put in a ten or a twenty you got SBAs in change. This was 15+ years ago.

@conder
Thanks for this great info.

I remember when the SBA's were announced there actually seemed to be a bit of interest over them. But I think that was more b/c of the concept and design. The Woman's Lib movement was a big things back then, and they saw this as agreeable with their goals. The rest of the people just thought the idea of new, small dollar coin was "interesting."

But after everyone had one or two, it was not too long after they I remember seeing and hearing people ask for "real money" when they were given these in change. It was more the concept of liking the novelty, but not wanting to use them daily. The idea I got was people expected them to be obsolete soon so tucking away one or two for collectors' value in the future was a smart idea.