As long as you can get people to collect it instead of spending it.
This was 30-35 years ago. The pound coins were worth a pound, which IIRC was worth about 1.75 USD, about the same as two Aussie dollars.
I’d use a 5 USD coin.
There’s nothing more American than people literally throwing money away while complaining about the government forcing them to do it.
What’s especially ironic is that the same people who complain about dollar coins, because they just throw away all of their coins, also rant against getting rid of the penny.
Definitely true. I do still use cash occasionally… but the last time I needed to actually make an effort to get cash was over five years ago.
The diameter of the loonie is the same as the U.S. Susan B. Anthony and presidential dollars. And the Canadian quarter is the same diameter as a U.S. quarter.
Somehow we never confuse a loonie for a quarter. It may be because the loonie has a polygonal edge.
Same in Canada, where the smallest bill is $5. Aside from the usual small contingent of whiners who resist any change, there were no issues with adoption.
Again, this is an imaginary problem that doesn’t actually exist in Canada or Europe. I hardly ever use cash any more but when I did, the $1 and $2 coins never accumulated because I spent them. That’s, like, what you do with cash. The real problem would have been with pennies but we dealt with that by getting rid of them.
As for distinguishing the different coins, the $1 coin (affectionately called the “loonie” because it bears a loon on the reverse side) is larger than the lower denominations and is uniquely gold-coloured. The $2 coin is also uniquely two-toned, being silver with a gold-coloured insert.
Another imaginary non-problem. The $1 loonie is larger than a quarter. It weighs 6.27 grams (the quarter is 4.4 g). Let’s go nuts and assume you have five of them in your pocket – I don’t think I’ve ever had that many at one time, but let’s assume. That’s a mass of 31.35 grams, or 1.1 ounces. I don’t think that’s going to cause your pants to fall down. 
By way of comparison an iPhone 14 weighs 172 grams, which is considered light for a smartphone. You could have 27 loonies jangling around in your pocket and they still would weigh less than the phone.
No, the reason Americans don’t want $1 and $2 coins is the same reason they shot at metric road signs.
This is true of many things, but the consequences are very different depending on the details.
When the mint changed the design of $20s, people had no choice but to go along. They got them from their ATMs and eventually the old bills were taken out of circulation. Everyone had to get used to them or just stop using cash.
But dollar bills still exist and people prefer them. Even if they somehow acquire a dollar coin, it’s a low enough value that a person can just dump them in their change jar (thus keeping it out of circulation) and only years later cash them in at the bank or a change kiosk.
I’m sure that if the mint discontinued dollar bills, people would whine for a while and then get over it. But as long as the bills are still around, the resistance will persist (as it has for the last 40-something years).
No, it can’t be. furryman was quite mildly ranting about the newest Dollar coin. The coin in your link was issued in 2007. Or is a 17 year old coin considered new in the coin world?
nm… ninja’d
The annual federal budget is over $6 trillion. That amount isn’t even a rounding error over 30 years.
So what? The federal budget is basically the sum of a very, very long list of items, most of which individually are each seemingly too small to worry about. $183 million a year would buy a lot of school supplies for America’s benighted public school system, for instance. Other governments seemed convinced that the cost savings are worth it, and as noted above, all the reasons being offered for why dollar coins are a bad idea are basically imaginary.
The 11-sided polygon looks much like a circle. I think the real reason is the loonie’s unique gold colour and of course its larger size than the lower-denomination coins. The loonie and toonie absolutely stand out in a handful of pocket change.
He didn’t say it was a new coin; he said it was the newest (i.e. most recent) dollar coin.
But that’s not right, either. The Presidential $1 Coin Program ran from 2007 to 2016, with four different presidential coins issued each year, followed by a coin honoring George H.W. Bush in 2020.
The newest dollar coin is the American Innovation $1 Coin Program, which started in 2018 and will run through 2032:
Once here in South Carolina I got a loonie in change as a quarter. Kind of impressed that it made it that far down.
That is impressive. I never realized loonies were migratory. 
Are you talking about this new Washington coin?
If so…it’s not a dollar coin; it’s a new quarter, and the Mint is now using a different portrait of Washington on it.
I use cash so rarely now that I’m completely out of touch with current circulating ones. It was only this week that I learned that there is a bat quarter (and felt sad because I don’t have one).
I still say that Canada needs to introduce a $5 coin, with a picture of an albatross on it. So it can be the Goonie.
It’s the one linked by robby above.
The gold color should be a giveaway, but it looks like it can be worn off fairly easily:
ETA: One giveaway is that the $1 coins lack a milled edge (which the quarter has). So they can be distinguished fairly easily by touch, if not by sight.
Any savings from the dollar coin has probably already been eclipsed by the cost of all the advertising campaigns to convince people to use dollar coins. Remember that weird commercial with George Washington’s head voiced by Michael Keaton?
No, but the fact remains that other countries are saving money by going to $1 and $2 coins, unless you believe that they don’t know how to do accounting. Another justification for the coins is that with inflation, those denominations once reserved for paper currency are becoming more commonly used in vending machines, parking meters, etc, and coins are much easier for machines to deal with. The fact is that a dollar today is worth roughly what a quarter was worth in 1980, so there are really multiple reasons to demote it to a coin while also eliminating the penny.
Rising costs were also the reason that many of those same countries eliminated pennies, something the US Mint still can’t get its head around despite those things being essentially worthless. Costs may still be recorded down to the cent, but when paying cash, the amount is rounded up or down to the nearest nickel. This is not just a convenience for the consumer, but another cost-saver for the government – when pennies were eliminated here almost exactly 14 years ago, it was costing the government about two cents to mint each penny.
I don’t think that resistance to getting rid of the penny is coming from the Mint; it’s coming from Americans who either (a) feel that the penny is useful, (b) are worried that, without pennies, somehow people will be getting ripped off, a few cents at a time, with prices getting rounded up to the nearest 5c increment, or (c) don’t want the tradition of American pennies to end.
Also, it doesn’t help that the company which supplies zinc blanks to the Mint has been actively lobbying to keep the penny.