Over A Billion Dollar Coins Sitting In Gov. Vaults.

Makes too much sense! However, I could lend a hand at getting some of these out in circulation!

Hahaha -- love the Scrooge McDuck, biokemist! Whenever I buy a lotto ticket, I briefly envision that scene. :)




I mostly agree with stopping production of one dollar bills, pennies, and nickels. Or maybe just include the pennies and nickels in mint sets. I like the $2 bill though; would like to continue to see it in production along with a $2 coin. I imagine that the cost of production of the $2 bill is miniscule compared to any other currency (because of production volume).

Heavens, what would all retail stores do with their cash register drawers that aren't configured for outlandish coins? Also, it would require a big effort for retailers to adjust all prices to a multiple of the smallest currency. Do they round up? Down?


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Not sure about that. On small individual transactions they may seem insignificant, but scale it up and it's a much different picture. For instance, if gas stations had to round to the nearest dime instead of cent, that would be a VERY significant amount of money.

Some places do use four-slot registers, but five slot registers are the norm. The configuration was intended to be: $1/$2/$5/$10/$20 for bills and 1¢/5¢/10¢/25¢/50¢ for coins. However, because halves and twos aren't used by many businesses, the empty slots are used for larger bills or twos and extra rolls or paper clips.

Assuming dollar bills were eliminated, a register would look something like this:

$2/$5/$10/$20/Large bills
1¢/5¢/10¢/25¢/$1

The only downside is that cashiers will have to find a place to stick paper clips and other supplies (maybe under the large bills?). Of course, if the cent were eliminated, just shift the coin spaces one to the left.

Rounding would only take effect if the transaction is paid in cash. In, Australia and New Zealand at least, electronic transactions are never rounded. If only the cent was eliminated, you'd round down if the price ends in 1, 2, 6, or 7, and round up if it ends in 3, 4, 8, or 9. If the nickel was eliminated as well, what Australia and New Zealand do is leave that bit of rounding up to the merchant, but they recommend that they'd round down to the nearest 10 cents if the total ends in a five.

I've had conversations with people about what would happen if we eliminated the cents, and a good number of them would think the merchants would automatically raise prices to the nearest nickel. I then explained about how rounding would take effect only if the bill is paid in cash.

There's a wonderful diagram that someone created that can be used to train cashiers and the public about rounding: http://home.earthlink.net/~fredeshe...Rounding.pdf

The rounding would average out as long as it was done properly. In school you learn to round down for 1, 2, 3, and 4 and up for 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9. That creates a slight bias to rounding up; 5 is equidistant from 0 and 10. Computer processors (usually) do it differently: they round to "closest or even". Which means that 5 would be rounded up half the time and down half the time. They actually round in binary which works differently but never mind about that. There are two reasons. 1) It eliminates a bias in any particular direction and 2) (technical) even numbers require fewer bits to store in floating point numbers and therefore you don't accumulate as much error in round.

So something like $1.15 would round to $1.2 and $1.25 would also round to $1.2, but $1.35 would round to $1.4 ($1.34 would still round down to $1.3). It might be confusing to people who aren't mathy, but cash registers would do it automatically.

We already round to the nearest cent when it comes to tax and interest calculations and we don't even notice. Changing it to round to the nearest dime should be fine.

The problem is that if we got rid of the nickel we'd have to also replace the quarter with a 20 cent piece or something or things would get really confusing and would require another change to the coin machines (would be better than the stupid bill accepters which barely work.)

It's definitely possible though. Countries that used the British system with farthings and eighthpence and crap managed to get through decimalization just fine. And the stock market was able to move away from 1/4th and 1/8th dollar values on stocks.

I guess it's time for all of us to send letters to our Senators and House Rep. telling them that we want to get rid of the $1 bill!

I agree, the cent and nickel should continue for mint and proof sets. They might as well make the cent 95% copper like they did in 2009.

Keep the two dollar note and and skip the two dollar coin, for now. The two dollar note would help the transition away from having a one dollar note. Even Canada waited almost ten years between the loonie (1987) and toonie (1996).

I wonder in a hundred years will the GSA be selling these coins off in a plastic case and everyone be going crazy over them. Remember the Morgan wasn't very popular when they were made and a big percentage of those were stock piled in vaults also. I really can't see these president dollars following suite but I am sure the old cowboys didn't ever think anyone would ever want those big bulky Morgans either. What is different is in the west the Morgans actually did do quite a bit of circulating (which kind of added to the mystique of the coin) where I can't think of any region where the president dollar circulates very much at all

The dollar coins have caught on in Ecuador, and I think they circulate alongside dollar bills, but most prefer the coin.