Goodbye To The Penny

The US Trade dollar was demonetized for a very long time until the Coinage act of 1965 remonetized it.

Any aluminum nickel being produced should not be legal tender and simply made to facilitate rounding to the nearest five cent increment.

I fear you're right about zinc and even though the elimination of the cent should have almost no effect on the number of five cent coins made I have to believe mintages will somehow soar anyway and the coins sit in warehouses and clerks instructed to return two ugly, dirty, and decaying nickels instead of one thin dime.

I am pretty sure that, like the penny, even if the metal was free it would still cost more than a nickel to mint the nickel. Without it however the quarter is problematic. Unless they replace the quarter with a 20-cent piece (been there, done that and trashed it) or make the half dollar usable again we are kind of stuck with it. I won't mention my repetitive claim that they should eliminate the penny, nickel and quarter, leaving the dime as the working coin.

Most of the cost of producing cents (.007 for the metal) and nickels (.0055 for the metal EDITED for typo: 0.055 for the metal content) is actually NOT the metal cost, but the production and distribution costs.

It is estimated that 530+ billion cents have been minted. The estimate is 100-200 billion are in circulation.

Coins last about 25-30 years on average. So at first I would expect that the cent should last until about 2050 or so in circulation. But what will "circulation" look like in 25 years as we progresss more and more to cashless transactions while there will be routine rounding for purchases to the nearest nickel (or even eventually the quarter)?

Eventually banks will stop ordering boxes of cents as demand for them drops when businesses stop ordering them. This drop in demand may happen rather quickly, in 1-3 years. Collectors might be able to order boxes of cents from the bank, but I would think banks will eventually charge a "convenience fee", and that will disuade some collectors from ordering them. Where will all these billions of cents end up? In the Federal Reserve vaults?

Wouldn't Congress have to abolish the ban on melting cents and nickels to allow the recycling of the metals from all these coins that will be sitting around, not being used anymore?

As for value, I think there are very few cents 1959-present with any significant numismatic value, except the high MS grades, proofs, 2009 copper cents/NIFC coins, and varieties (DDO, RPM, Wide vs Close AM, etc). They just minted far too many cents. 17 billion cents were minted in 1982! There are still significant numbers of BU rolls of cents out there for just $1-3 /roll. And also factor in older collectors from the baby boomer generation will pass away and flood the market with cent rolls.

Just a few extra common "cents" thoughts to consider...

I think the coppers will climb some, and bring the wheat cents up to maybe an average of 10-15 cents each.

Prediction: A rumour will start that pennies won't be accepted as currency anymore, and people will turn them in en masse. The Treasury will end up with billions of them and, lacking any reason or means to store them, will sell them off for scrap. Zinc and copper prices will fall for the mid-term shortly thereafter and in 50 years most zinc pennies still won't be worth much more than their weight because many still won't get turned in, and there will remain an oversupply of any made after 1963 anyway.

Not that I know of, modulo some shenanigans with UK Maundy coinage I don't know the exact details for (sources vary and some say it only goes to 1810s).

I know that UK sovereigns are legal tender back to 1817 (but not older) and I think a few other 19th century UK coins are still legal tender, but overall it's pretty rare for any countries to still have any pre-1900 legal tender, and (I hadn't specifically checked but) pre-1850 might be just UK and USA.

Laws for the, not for me. I have to assume that the government can recall and melt all they want.

31 U.S. Code § 5120 - Obsolete, mutilated, and worn coins and currency - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/5120