We take it for granted, but I’m wondering whether there’s any actual purpose for putting the year on coins . . . and on paper money as well. It’s an obvious practice for the purpose of coin collection, but does it serve a purpose for everyone else? It seems that including the name of the country and the denomination would suffice.
On US paper money, you put the date on the note when you come up with the basic design. You don’t change the date until you make a significant change in the overall design. If you change the signatures of the Treasurer or Sec. of Treasury, you just add a letter suffix to the date.
The difference between paper and coins is that after retirement, the coin has an intrinsic value in the metal, the type of metal and the value, may vary from year to year…
Well when they were of some value, they may have set the custom of writing the year on for the reason of assisting in sorting the metal types… (and improving the metallurgy by trial and error…)
Any copper coins in your pocket may be worth more as melt…or may have been in the last year or two… but its illegal for you to destroy currency, no matter the value.
Another difference is that notes have serial numbers, which can be used to determine year of manufacture, for whom it might matter (the “how long does the paper note last, on average ?” people… )
so the printed year can be the year of design…
A reason not to change the year on the note is so that counterfiet notes can be spotted easier…
And so that experts can know the year of the note design… eg if the notes have a different design year, that would explain some feature being radically different … eg the older one being a lower resolution.
I always hear this in the USA. How universal is this for other countries?
Back in 1970 the UK got rid of the, really quite stupid, imperial coin system. (And just how stupid - can you imagine 240 cents to a dollar?)
Anyhoo, in order to prevent coin hoarding, collectors holding onto the last coin runs, all the coins minted from 1967 to 1970 were dated… 1967.
So far, no one has given me a reason why dates are on coins . . . with the possible exception of metallurgy. I suspect it’s just a tradition, or the assumption that perhaps, someday, we may need to know when a particular coin was minted. Or possibly to detect “errors,” like a copper 1943 cent. In fact, I suspect that mint marks are actually more important than the actual dates.
It gives coin collectors something to do. For example I buy a US mint and uncirculated set of coins each year. If they didn’t have dates, I could just buy one set and be happy until there was some sort of change. The US Mint makes pretty good money by selling coins to people like me. Then there are people who save coins found in their change. Every dime, quarter, or dollar coin taken out of circulation makes money for the US government. Not so much for nickels and pennies though.
That may be a valid reason for continuing to date coins today, but it certainly isn’t why the practice originated. Coin dating is a holdover from when coins derived their value from their specie content. Coins of like metal (gold, silver, copper) from different nations, or even private mints, could circulate alongside one another with transparent exchange rates–a coin with an ounce of silver was worth twice a coin with a half-ounce of silver, regardless of nation of origin.
Specie standards would sometimes change. Perhaps the local ruler would decide to switch his kingdom’s basic coin from one ounce of silver to six ounces of copper. It would be important, for obvious reasons, to know whether your coin was minted before or after the change.
Actual debasing of the currency was a real problem centuries ago. In fact, the alleged silver and gold coins of the Roman Empire were so badly debased toward the fall that they essentially contained no precious metals and were considered of little value.
That’s probably the best answer we can get.
Some of the earliest dated coins are Roman. They would put “year 2/year 3/year 15” on some of them. The year would refer to the year of the reign of that emperor pictured on the coin.
You don’t get many dated coins again until Europe in 1372 AD. That’s when they started to make coins yearly with a new date each year.
My friend in the coin biz who knows world coins better than I suggested that it was a method to ascribe accountability to a mintmaster/moneyer, and if phony coins/debased coins were to appear, it would be a way to place blame.