Why are US coins made in the sizes they are? If I were designing coins, I’d try to make the more valuable ones larger than the cheaper ones - so why, for example, are pennies larger than dimes?
My wife stumped me with this question. (She thinks I’m pretty smart, but always has to remind me of the time I put used motor oil in with the windshield washer fluid). The best I could answer is that the metal that dimes are made of is more valuable than that for pennies, so they don’t need to be bigger. But that doesn’t answer anything, you could still make the dime larger by “filling” with cheaper material.
Back in the old days, coins were not adulterated with base metals. A dime contained ten cents worth of silver, and a penny contained one cent’s worth of copper. The marks on the coins were not to designate them as “money tokens” as it were, but were rather the guarrantee by the government that the coin was indeed worth that much.
The populace would have been up in arms if anyone tried to debase the currency.
As to why they are still the sizes they are, inertia is a powerful force.
A side issue to this question is: “Why do those damned Canadians always have to copy our money?”. Living, in Massachusetts, I often get Canadian money as change. I do not even notice until I try to use it in a vending machine and find out that I have a pocket full of worthless swill.
None of the coins “need” to be bigger, because modern money isn’t worth the metal (or paper) it’s stamped into (or printed on). The only reason a dime is worth 1/10 of a dollar is that the government says so. All the coins are made of base metals. There’s no silver or gold in any of them anymore. The penny isn’t even made of solid copper. It’s copper-clad (and a very thin cladding it is) zinc.
This is the era of fiat money. The dollar isn’t tied to gold anymore, and the coins are not intrinsically valuable.
Well, it’s worth something in Canada. Why not save it and come up to see us sometime so you can use it?
Actually, Canadian and US coins are the same size for the reason cited above–because they contained X cents’ worth of copper or silver or nickel.
For a long time–up until the last 25 years or so–the Canadian and US dollars were worth about the same. They fluctuated separately, of course, but were always within a few cents of each other. (Heck, I can remember when the Canadian dollar was worth US$1.05. Today, the Canadian dollar is worth US$0.65 or so.) But when the dollars are worth about the same, ten cents’ worth of silver is going to be the same amount of metal. So–the same size coins.