Streamlining U.S. currency | Hacker News Reader

Streamlining U.S. currency

marco.org

18 pointsstock_toaster22 comments

To minimize the number of coins and bills people carry, denominations should grow geometrically. Then no one has to carry more than one of each denomination.

1 dollar, 2 dollars, 4 dollars, 8 dollars, and so on until you have as high a denomination as you want.

half dollar, quarter dollar, eighth dollar, and so on until you have as low a denomination as you want.

The mint can make any denomination a bill or a coin. When inflation makes one too small to care about, you can stop making it; if you want, at the same time you can increment at which denominations you stop making coins and start making bills.

If inflation makes your bill/coin boundary something weird, like 32 dollars, you might want to create 1 new_dollar = 32 dollars and start again. If your inflation is growing so fast you have to keep devaluing... well, that's another problem.

EDIT (to bazzargh's comment): this scheme doesn't obviate stores needing spare coins and bills to make change. If Alice and Bob both have ($1, $4) here or ($1, $5) in old scheme, in neither case can Alice pay Bob $2. I could be missing something, but the new scheme seems no worse than the old in this regard.

No, that won't work. Alice, Bob each have $5. ($1, $4). Alice owes Bob $2. How does she pay? The problem of making change is worse for stores. Having lots of ways to add to the same amount is an advantage, not a disadvantage.

Interestingly - in terms of mathematical purity - we've already abandoned a system that was optimised for division (£sd - the pre-decimal £ evenly divided by 2,3,4,5,6,8,10,12) to one where we've optimised for ease of addition and subtraction - which we're taught in base-10.

> The problem of making change is worse for stores

I read an interesting article recently (can't seem to find it now), about Zimbabwe's hyperinflation of local currency and how they are using the USD as their unit of local money. This has caused issues because coins are expensive to ship there, and yet in Zimbabwe the value of small denomination coins are still quite relevant. This has apparently caused extreme issues in stores, where people are either waiting for change for long periods, or having to buy things they don't need to 'round up' to the next dollar.

Interestingly, apparently the two dollar bill is very popular there.

edit: found it: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/world/africa/using-us-doll...

What a fantastically reasoned comment. People don't often praise good comments enough. I didn't see decimalisation this way until now. Interesting.

I was in Las Vegas last week.

Las Vegas is the only place I've seen the 50c piece.

On this trip, I also saw a $2 bill. I hadn't seen one of these for a few years.

Going to coins for the $1 is an interesting idea that the US hasn't really got behind. I used to live in the UK when the 1 and 2 pound coins were first introduced. One of the hidden costs of these coins is that trouser (pants) pockets wear out much, much faster with the big and heavy coins. I've never had holes in my pockets in the US, and I always had them in the UK

My biggest objection is what you noted above: coins are big and heavy. This is not so much an issue when coins have relatively little value, like in the US, because there are tip jars everywhere and the value of the change is small. I round up tip jar deposits to the amount of change I want to discard.

In many other countries I find myself carrying an annoying amount of metal. Not only does the coinage add up to real money such that I would be more reluctant to discard it but in many other cultures there is not the equivalent of the ubiquitous change jars.

Of course, there is always plastic.

See, I actually like that. Here in the US, I'm annoyed when I have change because it's essentially of no use to me. Furthermore, if I can't find something like a tip jar nearby, I'm stuck with it.

When I'm in Canada, I don't mind having change in my pocket because there's a fairly good chance that the change will add up to a substantial sum of money that I can use when you consider how often you get loonies and toonies. My feelings on the subject seem sort of irrational to me though so YMMV :p

I'm working on a project to collect this loose change before it burns a hole in your pocket so you accumulate spedable bucks. Or, worse yet, you lose it which happens. There is over $10 billion in loose change scattered out in people's homes. Coinstar processed over $3 billion last year. I'm working on a different solution.

Another suitable addition: different sized polymer banknotes for the vision impaired, durability and increased difficulty in counterfeiting.

It wont happen. Just like the US should switch to the metric system.

I find that most countries do have way too many denominations to keep track of. Sweden has slowly been removing coins as inflation creeps up, and we've ended up with:

Coin 1 kr (15¢) 5 kr (70¢) 10 kr ($1.50)

Bills: 20 kr ($3) 50 kr ($7) 100 kr ($15) 200 kr ($30, to be introduced next year) 500 kr ($73)

And it works well, change is easy to use so you don't end up with too much of it (no jars of pennies), there aren't any coins with basically no value, and I find the split between coins/bills to be well-placed. Now if only we could get those nice polymer notes that Australia/Singapore has...

Why is reducing the number of denominations important? I'm all for eliminating the penny, but reducing the number of denominations isn't the reason. In fact, we should probably add a $500 bill at the top.

I think the best currency is the Japanese Yen:

* 1 yen, 5 yen, 10 yen, 100 yen and 500 yen for coins

* 1000 yen, 5000 yen and 10000 yen for bills

That would equate for USD or EUR to:

* 1c, 5c, 10c, 1 and 5 for coins

* 10, 50 and 100 bills

Additionally, the great thing is that between yellow and white coins, coins with or without a hole, you never mistake a coin for an other.

I'm currently living in France, and there are just too many coins. All the 2 or 20 should go away.

I think Japan needs to ditch all the coins you can't even use in vending machines, so the 1 yen and 5 yen need to go.

I kind of like this idea.

It has a nice tactile benefit too, in that the coin denominations increase in size as they increase in value. I always found it a bit odd that dimes are smaller than nickels.

Keep the $10 bill because it is very commonly used in restaurants ($6-7 meals + tip). Nobody will miss $2 or $50. I personally won't miss any coins except for quarters.

Marco's point was that he believes that people don't mind 5x jumps, so a $10 meal would be two $5 bills. Regardless of whether you buy into his premise, it's pretty obvious that we should kill the penny.

And the nickel too. Round everything to the nearest 10 cents.

Personally I don't use any coins at all - I don't carry them. If I get them as change (i.e. I was forced to use cash), I'll pay them at the next transaction then pay the rest using a credit card.

I only want bills - coins are too heavy and cumbersome to carry.

Then again I hardly use cash either, and frequently don't carry it.

I would add a $2 coin just like the Euro currency.

The £2/€2 coin is becoming more and more useful as prices of basic products (milk, break, soft drinks etc.) rise. Many of those things used to be less than £1/€1 and are now between £1/€1 and £2/€2. I find myself using it a lot.

Canada has a $2 coin. When I'm up there, I find myself using it a lot; an important thing in denominations is not whether each is a set multiple of the previous one, but whether the various denominations easily combine to produce common totals. So, for example, with $1, $2 and $5 denominations it's easy to produce pretty much any amount up to $20; then $20 and $10 make it easy to produce anything up to $100. And for anything more than $100 it's likely you're using a card or a check anyway.

I like it, but what about a $25 bill instead of a $20 bill? That would be more consistent.

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