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Comment by danudey | Hacker News Reader

I can't read the article you linked so I'm not sure if it mentions this, but IIRC one of the reasons for ditching the penny in Canada was that it cost more than a penny of copper to make a penny out of copper.

Now when we buy something we get told a rounded-off price (e.g. $3.72 is told to us as $3.70) but if we pay digitally (i.e. by card) then we get charged the exact amount.

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Exactly. When this first came down, many Canadians (including me, true confessions) had their petty quibbles at the till about rounding (ok the rounding was sometimes wonky, hence the petty quibbles). Most of us have got over it.

> but IIRC one of the reasons for ditching the penny in Canada was that it cost more than a penny of copper to make a penny out of copper.

That's true for all coins, otherwise it would be an infinite money hack

Isn't that backwards? If a penny contains more than a penny's worth of copper you can make "infinite" money by exchanging some money for pennies, smelting them down into copper, selling the copper for more money than you exchanged in the first place, and repeating the process until you're as rich as Bezos.

The overhead of obtaining a large amount of pennies and smelting them likely makes the whole operation unprofitable, besides being illegal for defacing currency.

> That's true for all coins, otherwise it would be an infinite money hack

The government can print money if it wants to; it's just a bad idea.

This is not correct. Most US coins (other than the cent and the 5 cent nickel) cost much less to make compared to their face value. For example, it costs just a bit less than 6 cents to make a dime, and just shy of 15 cents to make a quarter [0]. The "profit" that the government makes via minting coins and printing currency is known as seigniorage [1], and is reflected in the government's budget as revenue.

[0] https://thehill.com/homenews/nexstar_media_wire/5136331-how-...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigniorage

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