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Comment by atemerev | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I was growing up with these, and spent a lot of 15-kopeck coins in these devices. The graphics was awful, but the games were... playable. The shooting games worked flawlessly. The "sea battle" torpedo launcher simulator was awesome, with realistic ship silhouettes. The games were not unlike Tetris: simple, but ingenious and addictive.

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>15-kopeck coins

Honestly, that is the strangest thing about this whole article. Why would the Soviets mint a coin that can't be combined with other coins of the same type to make a full ruble? It just seems really unnatural.

Why do American stores charge you $1.99 instead of $2.00? The 15 kopeck coin was used to make change when you were charged 0.85 rubles.

Some images: https://www.google.com/search?q=15-kopek+coins&tbm=isch

The sad thing is that my grandfather gave me a collection of “rare” coins when I lived in Ukraine. When I moved to the US I couldn’t take them with me. Would be worth some money today and more memories.

because $1.99 is less than $2. it's a marketing thing. $19.99 => "For less than twenty dollars, you too can have a ShamWow".

whenever you see something that makes you think "why" like this, 99/100 you can blame it on PR/marketing.

I've also heard that this wasn't the case, but that it was to force the cashier to "ring" the transaction through to get the cent to return and not just pocket the $2. And that the custom just stuck.

AFAIK the 15-kopek coin existed already during the Russian Empire. The “mid-range” coinage came in multiples of five: 5, 10, 15, 20, 25.

Why coins of the same type should make a full ruble? In Soviet Russia there where coins for 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 15, and 20 kopeck. I never thought that a divisibility of ruble by a coin value might be a thing to consider.

I don't think it is something that people consider, just an aesthetic quality of most currencies around the world.

I can't think of a single other currency with a non-divisible coin (although I'm sure they exist historically). Even the old pre-decimal pounds/shillings/pence were all neatly divisible.

It's not that much of a problem when you can buy a lot of basic things with just the coins, I guess.

There's a Russian Wikipedia page about this you can churn through translate if you don't read Russian:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D1%8F%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%B0...

The basic gist of it is that it's of 18th century, pre-Soviet origin, back when kopeks were srs money and there it was useful to have denomination between 10 and 25 kopeks.

In Soviet times, retail prices were set centrally and printed or sometimes physically stamped on the products themselves so things adding up to a ruble is not something central planners had to worry about too much. You could guarantee prices in cast iron as seen on the handle of this skillet:

https://i.imgur.com/OxPA6Ij.png

Thanks, that explains a lot. The 3 kopeck coin is blowing my mind even more, though!

Oh the three kopeck coin was the most important coin. It went into the shared-glass soda machine.

https://www.rbth.com/history/332037-ussr-vending-machines-vi...

Thanks again, man. Maybe it seems strange, but from where I sit it's always really interesting to read about the little things from the Soviet era that so many people remember fondly.

We're all raised with stories of the famines and the gulags and all the horrible things that the communists did, so to see things like the old arcade machines or sodas or the best ice cream in the world (apparently!) is always really jarring in a positive way.

On a visit to the Estonian SSR in 1987 I bought a bottle opener that had the price of 15 kopecks stamped on it. I assume this was quite close to the cost of production, possibly establishing that shared ownership of the means of production totally works for uncomplicated commodity "kitchen infrastructure" products, cutting out marketing costs and pricing variances. Certainly it did not close off opportunities for making fancier bottle openers. Win!

The US issued a 15-cent BANKNOTE in the 1870s. It's a complete non-sequitir. It was part of a sort of emergency issue meant to replace the silver coins that disappeared during the Civil War and weren't returned fast enough, but there was no 15c coin to replace.

More relevant to this community, it always made me think about the abstract math of change making algorithms.

With the coin denominations we have in the US, the optimal (fewest number of coins) change can always be made by going for the largest coin available less than the remaining balance due. It's entirely possible to make a currency system that was not the case.

As a trivial example:

In a hypothetical system with coins denominated 20, 15, 10, 3, 2, and 1 (basically the Soviet-era model without the 5-kopeck coin) the optimal way to make 25 units (15+10) is not the "largest first" way (20+3+2)

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