Eliminate all coins and all bills except for the $20. Change is made with a pair of scissors. Money that has been confettied via numerous cycles of changemaking is simply weighed.
If counterfeiting becomes a concern, dope the money with a radioactive isotope. Use a Geiger counter to determine value. If desired, choose an isotope with a short half-life to encourage consumer spending.
Heh, it’s been about that long for me as well.
Your budget minded patron uses singles so he’s seen to be holding a tall stack by the edge of the stage. Or to make it rain – which would be rather painful with dollar coins. *She *knows you’re not laying down Benjamins or even Jacksons but you make a show for the other bros.
That was one of the things that surprised me about England, although in their case it is a surfeit of types of change that would seem to be a problem rather than not enough change. The one time I needed to use the head, I happened to have two of the proper coins, I think it was 2 20p coins, but what if the next toilet wanted a single 50p, or two 10p? If I go back and am worried about public restrooms I might need to carry a sack of English coins of all varieties just to be sure.
I like the way it (UK Sterling) works right now, so I’d reinvent that.
That is, denominations in multiples of 1, 2, 5 only - no exceptions for quarters or five-sixteenths
[ul]
[li]1, 2 and 5 pence[/li][li]10, 20 and 50 pence[/li][li]1, 2 and 5 pounds (I might bring back the pound note, or replace the fiver completely with a coin)[/li][li]10, 20 and 50 pounds[/li][li](if required) 100, 200 and 500 pounds[/li][/ul]
I’d redesign the coins so that ascending value meant ascending size (at the moment, 2p is larger than 5, 10 or 20p and larger - and it, as well as the 50p, is larger in diameter than £1).
I wouldn’t do that strictly proportionally, of course, or else £1 would have to be 100 times the size/weight of a penny.
I don’t know what a ‘CTer’ is but that’s not a good idea. Belief in the value of money is more fragile than that idea assumes, and the principal that old US money is always still good should remain.
My proposal would just address the two most ridiculous features of current US money:
-abolish the penny
-abolish the $1 bill (we make $1 coins but they’ll never catch on as long as the bill remains)
I would go middle of road on max denomination size and keep at $100, which has been greatly diminished over its time as max denomination by inflation and will continue to further slowly be eroded. IMO op-eds on eliminating it to supposedly fight crime or tax evasion is just picking an unnecessary fight along an existing fault line in society. If some people feel really warm and fuzzy about the govt and its degree of control, then just enjoy that good feeling wrt to the many ways it’s in everyone’s faces already. A lot of people don’t feel that way, and there are more important issues on which to use political capital (as goes for the power move of having it be any of the cops’ business what currency, if it’s real, somebody is using). OTOH somebody said to bring back bigger denoms like $500 but I don’t see that happening either.
For American currency I can’t decide what I want other than an obvious retiring of the penny coin. I support the poster above’s idea to change the sales tax system so the tax is included in the listed cost, which would stop complaining about businesses trying to make sure the final price is rounded in their favor. I don’t think that even the smallest thing you can buy costs less than a quarter and having a large sales tax of a nickel added to that wouldn’t be a large burden, much less than the benefits of being able to calculate exactly what your price will be.
Once you eliminate the penny you could probably eliminate the dime as well, since while it would make carrying nickels more cumbersome, you’d no longer have to carry around pennies and dimes. Perhaps make new nickels slightly smaller than they currently are.
I say keep the dollar bill, since adding back a dollar coin would negate the benefits of eliminating the penny and dime for the change-lugging public. I get that they last longer, but that’s the only benefit I can see.
Conspiracy Theorist
As for myself, I have little use for any coin under a quarter, and frankly even those are getting less and less useful as pay-by-card/pay-by-phone parking meters have mostly become the standard around DC.
I’d go with simply 25 cent and $1 coins, and $5, $20, and $100 bills.
And just for shits and giggles, 99 cent coins.
In US coinage we should ditch the penny already. The quarter meanwhile is a legacy of the octal dollar back at the foundation of the country - notice that once past the whole dollar there’s a $2 and $20 note, not a $2.50 and$25 note.
Right now the USA coinage goes .01, .05, .10, .25, then rarely used .50 and infrequently used 1.00. Paper money goes 1, rarely used 2, 5, 10, 20, infrequently used 50, 100. In actual practice most people with $100 in their wallet will have five 20s, most people with 50 cents in their pocket will have two quarters.
Were I setting up an emergent national treasury and its currency unit be at purchasing power close to a US/Canadian dollar, I’d just go ahead and make coinage decimal rather than centessimal and have the fractional coins be 0.1 and 0.5 then unit coins at 1 and 5 and notes (bold distinct colors, polymer base) at 10 and 50 for mass circulation and 100s mostly for bank and business use. I’d sure want to make sure a good enough bank transaction infrastructure is accessible to my population so that large payments are handled by cheque, credit or EFT, but I’d tip my hat to populist sentiment and let off-grid cash exist. At least for this lifetime.
(I’d also rationalize the sizes and weights of those coins so they are convenient to use, of course.)
(Oh, right: The strippers get tip jars. Or “club money” vouchers on the customer’s tab 
)
Couple that with the idea of posting all prices as post-sales tax and you’d have a winner. I like it. It’s a tangible admission that our collective populace really is dumb enough to think $2.99 is more like $2 than $3. 
I’m surprised no one has mentioned the three-coin system of
[ul][li] 3 shillings[/li][li] 14 shillings[/li][li] 27 shillings[/li][/ul]
This allows any amount up to 28 shillings to be paid using only four coins, and any amount up to 72 shillings to be paid using only five coins. For example, $72 is one Twentyseven, three Fourteens and a Three. To pay $67 hand over three Twentysevens and receive a Fourteen in change. To pay $1 simply hand over two Fourteens and receive a Twentyseven in change.
That is, any amount except 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16…
For 4 you pay 3+14+14 and get 27 in change. For 5 you pay 14 and get 3+3+3 in change. And so on…
If you’re starting a currency from scratch, what’s the point of decimal fractions? Instead of 0.1 being the smallest value, just multiply all values by ten and make 1 be the smallest unit. So you’d have 1, 5, 10, and 50 quatloo coins, and 100, 500, 1000 and 5000 quatloo notes.
o i c
Nolt usre it is ideal, but when I got poker chips to use as currency in board games (which often come with poor quality paper money) I went with quasi base 5:
1,5,25,100
This covers most board games (though I think I woukd need more for 18xx games)
Brian
In my scenario, the “unit” has been fixed at an exchange value similar to a US/Canadian dollar. Probably for political considerations. Obviously if the “unit” is fixed at an initial exchange of 10 to the dollar, your scheme works just as well.
One thing’s for sure, the public would quickly get better at arithmetic.
I’d like to learn a bit more about the principles behind this sequence and how it would extend upwards. But without a name I’m mostly stymied.
I don’t know myself–my “and so on…” was actually a joke, since I have no idea how to generate the exchanges aside from experimentation :). I was thinking of whipping together a little program to brute force the optimal sequence, but haven’t.
I can say that 3, 14, 27 does not appear as a prefix to anything in The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. Seems like a good addition if it is optimal!
Yes.
IIRC Grundy or Golomb might have explored something similar, though I don’t recall the use of subtractions (change giving).
I’ll try to extend it to four coins.
Once you start with a $3 coin, the $14 and $27 appear optimal as a three-coin set. Add a $124 to get the best four-coin set. The coins {3, 14, 27, 124} can produce any sum up to $28, $152, $276, $400 using 4, 5, 6, or 7 coins respectively. Given the {3, 14, 27}, $124 is the coin which optimizes each of the 5-, 6-, 7-coin cases.
But that’s assuming we have a $3 coin. The coins {2, 14, 25, 136} can produce any sum up to $32, $168, $304, $440 using 4, 5, 6, or 7 coins respectively.
That four-coin set might be the best. Other good sets include { 4, 11, 28, 133} which can produce any sum up to $26, $159, $292, $425 using 4, 5, 6, or 7 coins respectively.