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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

I actually really like US currency. Most other currencies I've handled seem to be almost entirely paper, too large, occasionally different sizes... I really like uniformly sized bills that fit easily into a wallet, and the fabric in the bill seems to improve durability and lend a nicer texture.

Other currency just feels... cheap. No offense.

Agreed on pennies though. They had their place back when they were useful, but they are almost pointless now.

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Other currency feels cheap? Are you kidding? Whenever I go the US I'm always reminded of how crappy the currency is. It looks and feels like it's printed on low grade recycled paper. Counterfeiting is such a problem that half the shops won't take 50s or 100s. And your wallet is perpetually stuffed with dirty, crumpled, near-useless $1 notes.

Imagine if you ordered a credit card from a bank and instead of receiving a shiny plastic card you got a low quality bit of printed cardboard. You'd think that was pretty low class, right? Well that's how I feel comparing the US and Aussie money in my wallet. The production quality on the American banknotes just does not match my expectations for a modern country in 2011.

Nothing against America of course, but I don't get the country's weird resistance to progress in certain areas, no matter how much of a no-brainer improvement that progress is. "Protect the greenback" - this is nothing but resistance to change, any change, no matter how beneficial. It's baffling how it can seemingly win the day, again and again. For me it is analogous to not upgrading to OSX 10.7 because you have nostalgic feelings about 10.6. I just cannot fathom how people get themselves into this state of mind.

OK, going rather off on a tangent there .. anyway other currencies do not look cheap : ) except the japanese yen, which IMO is the only major banknote series even worse than America's.

Shop's won't take 50s and 100s for another reason. Almost nobody uses them within the borders of USA. The clerk at the store (often a kid from a high school) just don't know how they are supposed to look. ;-)

50s aren't particularly common, but ATMs in Nevada and Reno disburse all large amounts using Benjamins. They are a pretty common bill. I'm guessing 99% of those clerks in a store would have no trouble recognizing one.

It is also a pain to make change for a 50 or 100, one example would be buying a coffee from Tim Hortons with a 100.

>I really like uniformly sized bills that fit easily into a wallet

You do realize your wallets are just smaller, right? Canadians don't go walking around with bills splayed out of our wallets, our wallets are just big enough to hold them.

Not sure which countries you're talking about in regards to the paper feel. I certainly noticed that in South America. Bolivia's currency, in particular, tended to be both in varying stages of decomposition and incredibly dirty. OTOH, the portrait on the 10 Boliviano note [1] was awesome enough to make up for any lack in paper quality.

[1]http://cdn2.iofferphoto.com/img/item/581/572/71/f7ce_1_b.JPG

Some countries (Malaysia, that I'm familiar with) actually have notes of a different physical size within the country. For example, the dimensions of the five ringitt and twenty ringitt note are different. I believe this is what the GP was referring to.

Great Britain is the same way. I hate it.

Aesthetically I love how the £50 note looks, in part thanks to its size, but it is really annoying. I guess most people don't often really come in contact with it, but anyone playing in a casino is likely to get them when cashing out, and they stick out of my wallet just a little, but enough to annoy me. And if you're cashing out a decent sum, asking for £20s isn't really an option,too many notes and the wallet won't even fold over.

Mexico has this too. 20 pesos bill, 50 pesos bill and 100 pesos bill are all three different.

Yes. It's an accessibility thing. It's easier to tell them apart if they're not the same size.

So why wouldn't they just have the denomination embossed in braille?

This implies actually knowing Braille. Even in very developed countries, not all blind or visually deficient people know Braille. Arguably, they should be pushed toward Braille rather than left in a "comfort" zone.

There are many ways for Braille to fail, particularly if embossed on a regularly-used banknote, and not everybody can use it. Differently-sized notes are much harder to break, and are potentially useful for everyone. Make the notes differently-coloured as well, and they're straightforwardly distinguished by most people, regardless of disability (or lack thereof), in a variety of situations.

(I would imagine Braille costs a fair bit to print, but banknotes are somewhat expensive to make - compared to most pieces of printed paper, I mean - so perhaps that wouldn't be an issue.)

Because when you are eighty years old and you become progressively blind, it's difficult to learn a completely new 'tactile' language.

And I'm pretty sure the euro too.

The Euro has notes of different sizes too.

The different sizes, I'm not entirely sure but I thought they were for blind people... somehow. Or I might be making that up.

This from Wikipedia also explains my dislike for $1:

    Approximately 42% of all U.S. currency produced in 2009 were one-dollar bills.

The different sizes make it possible to select a given denomination without either doing an O(n) lookup, or having to keep your wallet sorted.

What sort of barbarian programmer doesn't sort his bills? Unthinkable.

Having different sized bills is kind of like keeping your money in a visual/tactile hash-table. An array is the wrong data structure for your wallet!

The kind that profiles. The common case to optimize for may be insertion (especially with US $1 notes) rather than withdrawl. Semi-sorting by putting all change at the front while withdrawing for payment from the large bills at the rear is a decent tradeoff.

That's what I've found myself having to do. I've never had to have a sorting strategy before living in the US. The lack of distinction between notes is frustrating. I love it when Americans tell me they have colored notes too.

I still can't understand the preference for one dollar notes. Whenever I use a washing or vending machine I need to flatten out and align a dollar bill or insert dozens of quarters. Every few weeks I have to buy a couple of rolls of quarters from the bank. I paid a cashier with dollar coins yesterday and she did a double take and inspected each coin.

You actually got me to realize how natural it is for me to sort my bank notes. I also put older notes on the top of the stack so that they get out of it first.

I can't be bothered to manually sort something. Tell me when I can just call wallet.sort().

That is correct. Differently sized bills enable blind users to differentiate them without having to rely upon the honesty of a cashier or a complicated filing scheme (and, additionally, allow sighted people to more-easily differentiate denominations in low-light conditions).

Edit: specifically, I learned about this from Gordon Legge[1], the chair of the psychology department at the University of Minnesota when I took a graduate level course on human-machine interaction from him back in 2002 or 2003. I lucked out and had a very forward-thinking advisor in the Computer Science department who let me apply Professor Legge's class to my Senior year electives ;)

[1] see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Legge and http://vision.psych.umn.edu/users/legge/ for more on him.

My grandfather was blind and had to resort to his family telling him what the denominations were beforehand and then he folded the bills into different sizes. Apparently one day a cashier attempted to scam him by claiming the bill he gave was too small. Different sized bills would be helpful in that situation.

Different-sized notes also defeat counterfeiters who bleach smaller denominations and print a higher one.

I usually have a bunch of $1 bills in my wallet. I'm not sure I'd want $1 coins, given that they're heavier than a paper bill and are more likely to get lost.

Not at all. It's great, actually. My toonies, loonies, quarters, etc go in my change jar. My wallet is for bills (>= $5). I never carry change with me, and so don't have to worry about the hassle, and when I run out of money I have easily $50 in my change jar, which is enough for a frugal grocery trip. The proliferation of self-checkout stands also makes paying for $50 worth of groceries in coins slightly less embarrassing.

The old Canadian bills already had a braille-like pattern of raised dots that allow blind people to identify denominations without assistance.

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

Hopefully the new bills will retain this feature.

As for the good ol' American green-back. Americans are excessively conservative when it comes to their currency. Just look at how long it took them to add colors other than green! At least we no longer have to put up with Americans mocking our currencies for being multi-colored monopoly bills. If americans are skeptical of polymer bills I can only take that as a good sign for these new Canadian bills.

Pennies do have their place though. As much as I dislike carrying them around, imagine not being able to divide up money past the 5 cent barrier. Every store would have to change their prices to the exact point at which the price of the item + sales tax equaled a multiple of 5 cents. Or they would keep the item prices the same, at which point customers might not like they are being charged, at the maximum, 4 cents more than they should. Those pennies add up.

If you simply round to the nearest penny (3,4,5,6,7=5, and 8,9,0,1,2=0)on all transactions, then it evens out.

Those pennies really don't add up. See if you can find a store that won't add in the extra pennies to round you up, seriously - they certainly don't care.

A lot of fraud has been perpetuated by people shaving fractions of pennies off payrolls etc. Of course it adds up, and nobody's going to be rounding down anything. If a product costs 1.37, you will pay 1.37 with a credit card, and 1.40 with cash. And yeah it's the blue collar slob with two bankruptcies whose going to get his pennies shaved off.

No you won't. I never see charges with fractions of pennies when I use my card at the gas pumps (which charge 9/10¢ extra per gallon, remember); why would I see charges with fractions of nickels when pennies are gone?

I'm pretty sure the IRS cares though. GAAP don't allow you to just adjust numbers.

I'm pretty sure they don't, or else they'd be hounding you for the fractional pennies that you owe them (3/20 of every penny earned, remember!).

The IRS generally allows rounding to the nearest dollar on tax forms (at least individual and small business; not sure if large corporate are allowed to round even more). In fact, all the common tax software does so automatically; the only way to file a return to the cent is to do so by hand.

I doubt they care, as long as you pay 10% (or whatever it is) of total taxable revenue. I think that's how it works in Australia, where we do round.

The tax man only cares about aggregates, unless they are in audit mode.

In Australia, the shops will say "4.99", and round the total (say $24.87) off. The occasional crazy old granny will go through the supermarket checkout multiple times, forcing them to round down multiple times, but it's not that common. Inflation means that even 5c coins are seen as an annoyance by shopkeepers.

> Every store would have to change their prices to the exact point at which the price of the item + sales tax equaled a multiple of 5 cents.

Um, you know that sales tax results in prices with fractional pennies? And that stores simply round the prices?

> Or they would keep the item prices the same, at which point customers might not like they are being charged, at the maximum, 4 cents more than they should.

You mean like how gas stations add on 9/10 of a cent to every gallon?

We should get rid of the penny and the nickel, and then issue 10, 20, 50, 100, and 200 cent coins.

We don't need to "imagine" not being able to divide up money past the 5 cent barrier. Here in Australia, pennies have been abolished and everything is either rounded up or down to the nearest 5 cents.

New Zealand has already taken it one step further and has abolished 5-cent coins as well, rounding everything to the nearest 10. There's talk of doing that in Australia as well.

Keep in mind that the Aussie dollar is worth more than a US one, and Kiwi dollar is worth only 20% less, so we're talking similar amounts of value being rounded up/down.

Now, if only Australia hadn't compensated the abolishment of 1 and 2 cent coins with the GIANT 50 cent coins, my wallet would be very happy.

I have completely rid myself of coins. I leave them All in the penny tray. If they object, I give them to a friend I'm with, or finally toss them in the trash on the way out. At the drive-up, I toss them all in the donation slot.

No more pockets with a clump of metal in the bottom. No more fooling around trying to make a purchase come out even. Certainly no more counting them.

Its an amazing, liberating feeling! And it costs me far less than the time and effort I win back.

Many supermarkets in the UK have donation jars at the checkout. I'd usually just leave all the coins I got in change. I haven't noticed that here in the US.

Recently the in the Netherlands shops have started rounding the total cost to 5 cents. It saves work, nobody complains (even though euro cents are worth more than dollar cents).

Different size (and color) make it way easier to distinguish the different bills – especially for blind people.

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