DailyDirt: Pocketful Of Useless Coins

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Some people hate carrying around coins and just save them up in jars or throw them into water fountains. There is a never-ending discussion over whether or not to stop printing the US penny, but some folks just don't like rounding to the nearest nickel. Some new coins have been extremely popular (eg. the US state quarters), and all sorts of organizations are starting to print new kinds of collectible coins. Here are just a few examples of some not-so-rare coins. If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.
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Filed Under: coins, collectibles, diamond, money, nanofabrication, trinkets


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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 21 Jun 2012 @ 5:16pm

    heh... at first..

    I was like "who is Elizabeth Windsor?"

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_II

    Ahem.. yah, the Queen of England... DUH.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    Torg (profile), 21 Jun 2012 @ 5:54pm

    I've come to view bills as coupons that let me get local goods for free. Coins are like bills, but my bank's ATMs won't exchange them for real money.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      Michael Ho (profile), 21 Jun 2012 @ 6:25pm

      Re:

      I always wondered how Coinstar cornered the market on exchanging coins with machines that only accepted coins... ATMs are designed to be put a variety of locations, though, and Coinstar machines are usually only in big supermarkets.

      Maybe when diamond manufacturing is cheaper, we'll all carry around diamond-based currency...

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Preposition Joe, 21 Jun 2012 @ 6:22pm

    It's MINTING, not PRINTING

    Coins are "minted", not "printed".

    If you didn't know the right word you could have written "made" or "produced"...

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 21 Jun 2012 @ 8:04pm

    99 cent coins

    Will make people mark the price as 98 cents... as the whole point of this convention is to make you have some unit of money back while give a unit of money away...

    On the other hands, you may begin to see 0.99 or 1.99 soda on vending machines as they're designed best to work with exact charges. Now they would be able to take the 0.99 tactics...

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    Josh in CharlotteNC (profile), 22 Jun 2012 @ 6:41am

    Death to Pennies

    Yeah, I'm one of those people who want to get rid of pennies.

    It costs much more to produce pennies than they are worth (similar for nickels). This is low-hanging fruit if you want to cut government spending and waste.

    As mentioned, the US Mint used to produce half-cent coins. When they stopped producing them, the buying power of the half-cent was considerably more than today's penny. Commerce didn't grind to a halt.

    Australia and New Zealand have stopped producing them, saving millions. Canada is about to do so as well. Their economies aren't suffering as a result.

    If you want to keep them, fine, we can disagree. But please just admit you want to keep them for sentimental reasons and not because they are somehow necessary to the economy.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    davebarnes (profile), 22 Jun 2012 @ 7:57am

    18 and 32 cents are a bad idea

    Bad because they are not prime numbers.
    Take a lesson from JK Rowling. Now, there is a coinage expert.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    PlagueSD (profile), 22 Jun 2012 @ 8:33am

    the 18 and 32 cent coins, while statistically more efficient for returning change per transaction, it'll be a LOT harder for people to do "fast" math resulting in it taking longer to get your change as the cashier attempts to count by 18's or 32's. Pennies, nickles, dimes and quarters make it easy to count to 100. They are nice round numbers that divide easily into 100. 18 and 32 don't.

    Besides, there's already a problem with cashiers giving incorrect change. This will just compound the problem.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    weneedhelp (profile), 22 Jun 2012 @ 9:17am

    Nano-etching the lab-grown diamond

    Stealing diamonds now. Is there anything you damn pirates wont copy?

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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