DailyDirt: Making More Real Coins, Not Bitcoins...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Minted metal coins require quite a bit of design and planning in order to encourage people to actually use them and to keep them from being easily counterfeited. The recent buzz over various cryptocurrencies makes real, physical currencies sound outdated, but what would you rather have in your pocket? (Sure, you can carry around a lot more cryptocurrency on a thumb drive, but would you really want to?) Here are a few links on some new coins that you can collect and store in piggy bank.

• The Royal Mint is looking to introduce a new £1 coin that it claims will be the most secure coin in circulation. It's a dodecagon coin (no, not a dogecoin.. a twelve-sided coin) with high-tech security features that go beyond the coin's size, shape weight and composition. [url]
• Curved coins from the US Mint will be produced according to the National Baseball Hall of Fame Commemorative Coin Act. The curve of the coin will match with a baseball glove on the concave side and a baseball on the convex side. However, this kind of curved coin probably won't make it beyond commemorative coins because it'd be a nightmare to re-design vending machines to accept them. [url]
• For a while now, it's cost more than $0.01 to mint a penny and more than $0.05 to mint a nickel. There have been some proposals to change the metal composition of these coins, and if you didn't know, the penny was once minted from steel (in 1943) and from aluminum (as a test in 1974). [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: coins, dodecagon coin, money, national baseball hall of fame commemorative coin act, nickel, numismatics, penny, royal mint, us mint