The coke machine at my office has a sticker near the coin slot that proclaims that the machine takes the new Golden Dollar! The only trouble is, it doesn’t really. Won’t fit. I actually like the dollar coins and try to keep some with me.
Keeping the 1 cent coin and the 1 dollar bill is just stupid and a result of the spineless politicians not being able to do what is logically and fiscally correct in order to pacify a few loud-mouthed curmudgeons that can’t tolerate a little change (no pun intended).
The penny is useless and the 1 dollar bill is a waste. Eliminating them both would solve the cash register problem.
Counterfeiters currently bleach out $1 bills to get the paper for $100 bills. Eliminate the $1 bill and at least they would have to use $5 bills and that would cut their margins. One of the cable channels (TLC, Discovery, whatever) ran a program showing counterfeiting labs in Columbia processing $1 bills into $100’s.
It’s much less expensive to adapt vending machines for coins than to accept paper money which is what most of them have to do now. The vending machine argument is now false.
Dollar coins are what quarters used to be. Let’s just get used to it, realize the cost benefits and get on with our lives instead of bellyaching like a bunch of old spinsters over anything new or different.
Quoth moriah:
The system Europe is now using, which makes a lot of sense, has currency in 1, 2, and 5 times powers of ten: That is, they have
(coins)
1c
2c
5c
10c
20c
50c
1€
2€
(bills)
5€
10€
20€
50€
I presume that they go up to 100, but I’m not sure on that.
This is sort of the best of both worlds: It’s approximately binary, so you need a minimum of pieces to make any given amount, but it also matches our familiar human base 10. Laboratory weights are often made in these increments, for the same reason. The downside is that you need many different denominations: Twice as many coins as Americans (commonly) use, and nearly as many bills. European cash registers therefore need more compartments than American ones, but they don’t actually seem all that crowded.
We’ve been using Sacejawea coins for years, but they’ve only recently become both common and useful here in New York, mostly because of the growing number of Metrocard machines in the subway stations. The machines always return large sums of money (up to $6) in the form of Sackies or Susan Bs. My station has an operator in it, but he’s only there from 6 AM to 7:15 AM. I use the vending machine, which often has problems with bills, so I end up going to the deli next door and changing my bills to coins.
And now that the MTA is tightening their belt and phasing out toll booths and replacing them with the vending machines, I expect the dollar coin will become more desirable than ever here.
This is only one reason that I hate Dockers, and all the other allied khaki styles. I detest them on so many levels…but that’s another thread.
I generally agree with your point, but I want to make a minor nitpick. The set of n denominations (or weights) which allow all values in a range 1 - r to be constructed with the minimum number of pieces isn’t generally binary. When you stop and think about it, if too many small combinations of your lower denominations sum to one of the higher denominations, you are “wasting” combinations, and some other selection may cover the values more efficiently.
I got curious about this once when the question surfaced as a puzzle on usenet, and brute forced a bunch of solutions for several values of n and r = 99 cents. I also considered the question of which set produced the smallest AVERAGE number of coins required, as opposed to the smallest minimum. I can probably dig up the numbers, if you like.
We choose things like laboratory weights and coin denominations for convenience in calculation, not this sort of optimization - I would rather carry an extra coin or two than deal with 33-cent pieces, or something like that.
I’m pretty sure that 100-Euros is not the highest denomination.
Whether the penny still serves any useful function nearly always comes up in these Sacagawea threads. So I’m curious how people in the EuroZone feel about their “pennies”…that is, the 1c coin. Is it just a nuisance? Do you wish they would go away?
As I noted above, Germany used to print pfennigs, and it seemed ridiculous to manufacture a coin that was worth only about half a U.S. cent. But on the other hand, the pfennigs were so tiny that you hardly noticed them if you had them, and you didn’t care much if you lost one.
That’s just it: seven quarters is a lot of change for me to lug around. Seven Sackies would likewise be more coinage than I’d care to carry. Seven one-dollar bills, OTOH, can be stuffed into my wallet and carried with no trouble at all.
Bills are simply less encumbering than coins, which is why most Americans prefer them.
I’m finding it difficult to imagine a General Question still on the table here. Can someone find one, or should this thread sink?
We’ve pretty much rehashed the same arguments here. In spite of my strong feelings on the issue, I advocate closing (though not being the OP, perhaps it’s not my place to say).
Wads of hundreds? Obviously you’re involved in something extremely illeg … er … lucrative.
I don’t think it’s the OP’s place to say, either.
As long as this thread has been resurected, I’ll cite Marge Simpson’s verdict on the Sackie:
If you take it down to the bank, you can exchange it for a REAL dollar!
I don’t see why this is surprising. I don’t live in the USA but I work there probably 100-120 days a year, throughout the lower 48, and I live near the border. In three years I have never seen a single Sacejawea dollar. Not one. Ever. I have never in those three years seen a vending machine that would take one, or a pay phone. If I hadn’t read the article about it when they released it, and wasn’t on the SDMB, it would have been easy to not know it exists. Since I - like most people - also don’t have a clue who or what a Sacejawea is, it would be easy to see the name and still not understand what was being referred to.
I realize it’s rather late in the thread to be making factual contributions, but…
In response to the OP: hundreds of millions of Sacagawea dollars have been shipped to Ecuador, which adopted the US dollar as its official currency after years of hyperinflation (due to mold attacking the banana crops, and El Nino decreasing fishing yields in the late 90s, among other things). The Ecuadorans don’t seem to have any problem with it; they actually like it.
In fact, there was a massive Sacagawea counterfeiting operation in Columbia in 2002, directed at the Ecuadoran market.
In 1995, three highschool students did an analysis of the “most efficient” coin combinations for making change for amounts under one dollar (or one Euro) This article summarizes the findings, and has a link to a PDF of the original paper.
The Mathematical Intelligencer had an analysis by Jeffrey Shallit (then of the University of Waterloo) that concluded that the addition of an 18 cent coin would improve the efficiency of change-making under the current system. I have a link to his article but it doesn’t seem to be working at the moment, so I can’t comment further