What denominations, and when did they happen?
Off the top of my head: there was the half cent, minted until just before the Civil War; some short-lived two- and three-cent pieces and an even more short-lived 20-cent piece (all from the mid-19th century); and various gold coins ($2.5, $5, $10, $20, all of which were standard denominations up until we stopped using gold in the 1930s). There was a $3 coin for a little while as well; I think it lasted more or less exactly as long the 3-cent coins, and this was because 3 cents was the standard postage rate at the time.
There is a table:
Note that the $100,000 can’t be said to be “discontinued” as such, because it was never publicly available.
Yeah, I was going to mention the gold double-Eagles ($20), Eagles ($10), half-Eagles and quarter-Eagles (misspent youth as a coin collector), but you beat me to it.
I had a 20 cent piece that I used to expose supposed psychics on this board and a few others.
I’m trying to sell the coin collection I amassed as a teenager (with little luck so far), but the one coin I’m keeping is my 1871 3-cent nickel, because it’s so cool.
The penny. Just now.
Cool! And how about the “mill” or one-tenth of the now defunct penny? Admittedly it seems to have been more often a theoretical rather than a practical currency unit, but apparently some state and local governments, as well as private institutions, did “mint” one-mill tokens.
I once took a $500 bill at Target, in the early 1980s. I was able to give the person change, so it really was NBD.
That’s the only one I’ve ever seen.
They stopped production of $2 bills in 1966, and resumed making them as Federal Reserve notes in 1976.
Apparently hoarding accounts for so few being in circulation.
I’d love to hear the story.
I know a few people (nearly all men of a certain age) who still like to use $2 bills to pay for things, as they seem to enjoy the novelty of it. They’re the same sort who like to use dollar coins, too.
I would love to pay for something with a mixture of Eisenhower dollars, Kennedy half-dollars, sakies, and susies. Maybe mix in some $10 bills from the ‘50s. But I’d settle for a stack of $2 bills.
When my nieces were preschoolers, my brother had his bank order a pack of $2 bills. That was the kids’ Tooth Fairy money.
I think this hoarding is a case of a self-fulfilling prophecy. People think $2 bills are rare, so they keep them, and that’s what makes them rare, perpetuating the cycle. In fact, they can’t be all that unusual; I’ve come across one during a two-week trip to the US in 2000 (and I was a kid at the time, so I wasn’t really handling a lot of cash).
I’ll take this opportunity to repeat one of my favorite entries from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1906-1911)
Hippogriff, n. An animal (now extinct) which was half horse and half griffin. The griffin was itself a compound creature, half lion and half eagle. The hippogriff was actually, therefore, only one-quarter eagle, which is two dollars and fifty cents in gold. The study of zoology is full of surprises.
Incidentally, Mark Twain’s hero in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Hank Morgan, introduced coins worth millrays into Arthur’s sixth century Britain, because values were so low that it made sense to use coins with such a small value.
Basically, if someone professed to have the ability to “far-see”, I would ask them to tell us what coin was taped to my desk. It was never hidden, and there was never other coins that could confuse people (both claims being made, btw). No solid guesses even came close. It was an 1876 Philadelphia Mint 20 cent piece, and unfortunately it disappeared when the house went up in flames last Christmas Day.
This has been discussed before on this board; on one hand, while rarer than $10’s, there are not that few in circulation. On the other hand, well, for the Fiscal Year 2026 the Federal Reserve has ordered exactly… zero $2’s. So, maybe not officially discontinued, but nobody wants any? It has been a long time since a couple of dollars was worth anything (3-4 bucks will still buy you a cup of coffee, though… for now)
In my area, they encouraged folks to get a new $2 on the first day they were made available, get a bicentennial themed postage stamp put the stamp on the bill and have it cancelled at a post office on that same day. Lots of folks (me included) did so for the hell of it.