Worth noting this piece was written in 2002. Ten years later in 2012, Canada finally took the penny ($0.01 coin) out of circulation.<p>Cash transactions were to be rounded to the nearest nickel, whereas cashless transactions were still computed in pennies.<p>(As far as I can tell, the main reason the US hasn't done the same is due to the prevalance of souvenir penny press machines.)
One issue they mention is that you lose the simple greedy algorithm for making change. For example, for $0.38 it's better to give 2x$0.18 plus 2 pennies (4 coins), but many might intuitively give back a quarter, a dime, and 3 pennies (5 coins). Besides the added complexity, introducing a new coin solely to reduce the amount of change given is not effective if it is not used optimally.
Silliness aside, I love that someone is trying to come up with something innovative with cash.<p>I carry and use cash whenever I can. It might only have a few more years of value as more and more places adopt pervasive surveillance and facial recognition technology, but I'm going to hold out for anonymous purchases as long as I can. The only entity that should be able to know my complete purchase history is me.
This analysis assumes a uniform distribution of the amounts paid. With stores tending to charge $?.99 for their products and many people buying only a handful of products in small transactions, I suspect the distribution isn't all that balanced.<p>With the power of the modern internet, we could pool together receipts all across the world and design a change system fit for real world usage.
I was going to suggest that adding a 12 or 24 cent piece would be an easier sell since people are already used to dealing with 12's due to clocks.<p>But in my observation, the younger generations are less adept at that -- if I tell my nephew it's "quarter 'till 3", he says "I don't know what that means", then I explain it and he has to really think about it and do the math in his head to figure out what time it is. Which makes sense since I grew up reading analog clock, and he most often uses his phone or iWatch with a digital time display most of the the time -- the habit of breaking time into quarters is not as intuitive.
Maybe interesting aside: I saw a link to this when it was first published at the height of the p2p networks craze and noticed some similarities between the two.<p>One of my students at the time, Mahadev Konar, ended up writing a paper "Ring-like DHTs and the Postage Stamp Problem" [1] that shows how you can use solutions to the postage stamp problem (aka denomination-choosing problem) as a way to structure the finger pointers in Chord. And went on to co-found Hortonworks.<p>Sometimes random things on HN end up having implications in other areas!<p>[1]: <a href="https://alexmohr.com/papers/dht-postage-stamp-podc2005-extended.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://alexmohr.com/papers/dht-postage-stamp-podc2005-exten...</a>
Great 2002 logic - but that's practically the archaic 20th century. People, it's 2023!<p>There should be a wildcard coin with an NFC chip & e-paper display. Vendors & consumers should be able to load/drain it of any sub-$1 (or local smallest bill) amount needed - via proven-untraceable methods, like zk-proof-based e-cash.<p>So let's call it an 'Aenny', pronounced 'enny', as portmanteau from 'any [amount]' and 'penny'.<p>Anyone carrying physical cash would also typically carry a single Aenny - maybe as part of a physical wallet or bill-clip or even jewelry. Any 'change' made to them would simply adjust their Aenny balance as needed to keep physical transfers nice round full-bill amounts.<p>But mass-produced, they'd be so cheap you could have 'take an Aenny, leave an Aenny' plates with free blanks at every register.<p>All legacy fiat coins can then become collectors' items – or exchangeable, by law, to banks for one Aenny per cent. (Your quarter gets you 25 Aennies.)<p>Progressive jurisdictions that become comfortable with the system could potentially increase the maximum value held on an Aenny – which is always a cash-like anonymous bearer instrument, with all the benefits & risks that implies – to be far more than the smallest cash bill size.<p>Eventually, most routine daily purchases could be completed by direct Aenny-to-Aenny rebalances – occasionally handing over the unit itself, as if were physical cash, as necessary.
This may be controversial, but I liked coins back in the day. It feels more "human" to me.<p>Inflation targets will ensure coins are worthless soon enough tho. I'm a fan that governments can't impose these targets on crypto.
Interesting read indeed! We need more innovation in this space. I am in the camp of cash users for several reasons. Increasingly, electronic forms of currency and credit are used as a means to exert control over vast majority of the population. The data can be misused by government and private entities to profile and target certain minorities. Crypto was supposed to solve this but that hasn't really panned out as governments do not want competition to their fiat currency.
Related. Ohers?<p><i>What This Country Needs Is an 18¢ Piece [pdf]</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14579635">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14579635</a> - June 2017 (45 comments)<p><i>What the U.S. needs is an 18-cent coin</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3985299">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3985299</a> - May 2012 (28 comments)
Using physical money is starting to shift in some areas of my state. At several marching band competitions this past year, venders wouldn't accept cash at all.<p>This is the first time I ran into this and was a little surprised. Then, we went to a high school football game in a local, smaller town and it was cash only!<p>I'm guessing cash only because of card fees and cards only because of possible theft or bank fees?
6*3=18<p>What if we just up the nickel from 5¢ to 6¢?<p>The biggest problem our society has with counting is decimal. If we used a base with more factors, our counting would be more flexible, and we wouldn't have to deal with as many remainders and rounding.<p>Just imagine what the metric system would be like if it were made out of duodecimal (base-twelve) instead of decimal! It would be great.<p>Unfortunately, it's far too late. Changing bases would introduce way too much overhead.
The paper mentions how it's preferred to say "1 cent" rather than "penny" about US coinage, which reminds me of how shocked I was when I first encountered a bunch of US currency. Depending on the year it was made, most of the coins don't say how much they're worth on them. e.g. cent, nickle, dime, quarter rather than however many cents it is.
Digitally encoded coins - 1 cent to $10 with everyone having small readers/value assigners linked to account or other portable value store.
Made hard to fake, your store = size of a credit card - flat near field access.
> <i>we assume that every amount of hange b etween 0¢ and 99¢ is
equally likely</i><p>As the paper admits, this is a bad assumption. Curious to see the number given actual price data.
Saw the title and immediately though of the Army Man joke (from the first page of the first issue!): "What this country needs is a good 5¢ sports car."
What the US needs is to abolish all coins except the quarter. Due to inflation, a penny in 1913 is worth about 30 cents now. And somehow they made do with no smaller coins than the penny (the half cent having been discontinued in 1857).<p>Why are we shuffling these worthless bits of metal around? I’m sure it’s to enrich some medium size companies in a few important Congressional districts.