Hacker News Reader

Comment by wlll | Hacker News Reader

Background: I'm British and live in the UK but have spent a fair amount of time in the US over the years.

I love the dollar bill. I'd really love to have a £1 and/or £2 note in the UK. The moment you need any reasonable number of coins to buy anything they become unwieldy in your pocket and you can carry enough dollar bills to be useful without there being a chunk of metal digging into your leg.

I've hears arguments against relating to durability but those are all predate the new plastic notes we have.

For some reason I get a load of pushback when suggesting that a £1 or £2 note would be nice to have.

View on HN

I think with polymer notes, they might last until withdrawn by UK standards, but that's a unique factor of how fast they cycle their banknotes out. I think even 5 year old English notes (the paper GBP50 with Watt on it) are at the phase where you have to take them to a bank and replace them with polymer ones.

America has always tried to avoid calling back old notes, likely to avoid creating an upset in places where they're a store of value overseas. This means the old ones can circulate basically forever. I can recall my brother getting a $10 note of the 1934 type in a normal transaction in about 2015, and 1977-series $100s seemed strangely common into the 1990s and 2000s. So the survival rates at 10 and 20 years are relevant for American paper in a way that maybe don't apply in the UK.

Isn’t it because the US supports large scale money laundering and tax evasion whereas more civilized societies try to get rid of it?

I think its meant as not spooking the people in countries with unreliable currencies that hoard USD like one might gold bars

So, money laundering. ;-)

Its not laundering to buy gold and store it, same with stashing USD

Why is it a problem then to take it and have it replaced by newer and safer bills?

In countries that do introduce newer standards, you can still take old bills to the central bank and convert them.

I don’t buy that argument. It doesn’t make sense, especially compared to the immense damage of fraud.

The Bank of England don't manufacture £1 notes, but the Royal Bank of Scotland still make them.

Perhaps you can help popularise them, so they make even more!

You can still create a massive wad of cash to impress the ladies with 5's and a 20 for not such a high cost.

On the other hand, coins are pretty neat.

They are also far more durable than bills, specially lower-denomination bills like the $1 note that wears out quickly because it is used more than higher-denomination bills.

I am curious what the cost difference is to manufacture a coin vs a banknote. Certainly the penny is probably going to not be worth much more than a penny in melt value, but for stuff like quarters if I can make 5 bills that each last 5 years that may be more preferential than a single coin that lasts 25 years because it gives better control over the money supply.

I use them almost exclusively as collectors items for whatever country I visit. And nothing else. America is mostly cashless nowadays anyway. My thought is that at least in America, we will not be rid of coins for another few decades at least . Because gauging by the current climate it looks like the only way we start to phase some of these denominations out is when inflation makes them impractical and useless.

Being in Europe, I'm surprised you can get anything with coins in the States. I'd struggle to find much under €1.

They are mostly relegated to a jar that you take to the coin exchange once every X years. I honestly don’t remember the last time I actually carried coins and paid for something with them (aside from receiving them as change and dumping in said jar) but it was over a decade ago that I used to actually carry change in my pocket for use. Could have probably been two decades ago almost.

Probably the most actionable use I have for coins in todays era is having a quarter for the deposits for the carts at the Aldi lot.

In our household we call them “parking tokens”. We use cash for little else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com