Hacker News Reader

Comment by subharmonicon | Hacker News Reader

Making fewer pennies means needing more nickels. Which have an even larger loss per unit: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/10/business/cost-to-make-penny-n...

View on HN

Why would we need more nickels? Transactions will end up being rounded to the nearest nickel, which will end up being a dime on one side or a nickel on the other as the smallest necessary coin. Seems like it all evens out.

Both will be used more, the issue with the nickel is that it costs around 14¢ to make one.

I'd have to see a mathematical proof as to why nickels or dimes would be used more, I don't actually think that's the case.

The only logical argument I can imagine is that people are using stacks of 5 pennies now routinely instead of nickels. But personally I never see that happening.

All of the "more nickels" noise is being paid for by the penny copper supplier.

The penny is mostly zinc. It's only 2.5% copper.

Interestingly, the nickel is 75% copper -- so copper suppliers would strongly prefer to ditch the penny if it meant making more nickels.

Keep going! We only need the quarter.

We need to stop minting pennies and nickels. We could stop inflation by restoring the gold standard but nobody seems to mind inflation that much.

Getting rid of pennies/nickels sure, but where does the gold standard come in?

You want to tie the economy to a material that doesn't capture economic growth and which also has its remaining stores in areas of the world not owned by your nation?

If Google wasn't lying to me with its response, the current USA gdp is over $20 trillion, and the US owns around $200 billion in gold.

Wouldn't tying gold to the current economy either devalue the dollar or inflate the current value of gold before locking the country into a state of economic stagnation?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com