An Argument For The Adoption Of Titanium Coinage

Is there any country that uses that metal in their coins?
John1

Titanium would be way too hard to use for anything besides a low mintage collector coin. Depending on the denomination, dies are used to strike anywhere from ~150,000 to 1,000,000 coins, keeping in mind that the dies are composed of hardened tool steel. Steel dies would not last very long striking titanium and dies made of titanium would not be practical either.

I will be splitting the posts out of this thread which are discussing the constitutional aspects of coinage , you will find the thread in the GD forum.

Please do not continue the conversation here.

I love this idea! I should just go Lord Baltimore II on the US and start minting my own coins in titanium. Anybody know where I can pick up an old minting machine?

This is a good point I never thought of.... so then we need to make the coin a millimeter smaller in diameter than the old dollar coin.

And as far as the dies being too weak to get the job done, can we just forge the coins?

The Pobjoy Mint, using it's flag-of-convenience the British colony of Gibraltar, issued the first titanium coin as part of it's Y2K series in 1999. Example on BMC. Many other NCLT coins have featured the metal since.

Titanium takes the anodizing process very well, so many of the recent titanium collector coins have been produced in all sorts of funky colours.

However, nobody uses titanium for normal, everyday, circulation coinage. It's just too expensive.


While titanium might look cheap "on the shelf", actually doing anything useful with it is expensive. That's why the only things titanium is used for these days are specialist applications where money is no object and it can't really be replaced with anything else (like surgical implants and spaceship parts). The price of titanium "metal sponge" is five bucks a kilogram; the price of a sheet of solid pure titanium suitable for punching coin blanks out of is much higher. Further to the cost, the scissel (the stuff left over with all the holes punched in it) would be expensive to melt down and recycle; it would probably be cheaper to throw it away and buy new sheets (creating a mountain of waste).

Pure titanium is simply too tough to make mass-produced coins out of. It has a high degree of "shape memory" - you hit it (like between two coin dies) and it just bounces right back into it's old shape once the pressure is released. You've got to keep hitting it, again and again (or hit it with incredibly high pressures) to make it "forget" and take a new shape. They can get away with it for low-mintage collector coins, because the mint can afford to take their time and recoup whatever increased costs working with titanium causes by simply increasing the coin price. These options wouldn't be possible for a mass-produced circulation coin, where high speed and low cost is critical.


Besides the increased cost of having heated blanks, you wouldn't actually get much benefit out of it. You can't "forge" titanium in the conventional sense; at least, not on this planet. One of titanium's weaknesses is that in a normal oxygen atmosphere, it starts to burn at about 400 degrees C, well below the temperature it would start to soften at. Nitrogen (the other major component of normal air) also makes pure titanium brittle, so you'd have to enclose the whole coin press in an argon chamber, which would be both expensive and time-consuming.

Alloying titanium with other elements might work, and give you lighter, tougher coins - but anytime you add titanium into the mix, you always increase the cost, of making the alloy, working with it, and recycling the unwanted remainder material (or the old, worn-out coins). We just don't have the technology to do it cheaply.

In short: there are plenty of cheaper coinage metal alternatives. Steel, aluminium, ceramic, plastic...

I guess your looking for a design like this tesla medal..