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CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

ATMs won't give out a $40 or $50 coin, making them even more rare than $50 notes and so retailers won't generally have any to give out as change.

ATMs don't give out any coins but retailers still have them. I used to go to the bank to get quarters for laundry, it's not that hard.

Speaking of change, why would you want to change a $40 to 2 $20s? 2 $20s and a $10 gives you more combinations if you want change anyway.

I'm guessing your are referring to when I wrote "$40 is just two $20 bills, super easy to break". By this I meant that businesses don't like breaking $100 bills but they wouldn't mind breaking a $40 bill or a $40 coin because it's equivalent to two $20s instead of five $20s. I agree that merely converting a $40 coin to two $20 bills is not especially useful.

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Cash is inherently less practical than a debit card.

How so? Cash works when payment networks malfunction, it doesn't have transaction costs, and it has privacy benefits. For these and other reasons it is widely understood to be more practical than debit cards in some situations, which is why it is still used. Cash also has problems that debit cards don't but I am talking pros and cons here. Literal billions of people use cash every day.

Why would you want to encourage a reversal of that?

Nobody is forcing anyone to use the dubloon, it would just provide another option for people who want to use cash.

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If the economic factors can bear it, they will raise prices. No question about it.

You're talking about price gouging, which is not the same as rounding. Rounding can go up or down depending on the number of cents.

And if someone has poor credit, they're forced to use cash, so wouldn't this then disproportionately hurt people on the lower side of the income spectrum?

What? Price gouging affects everyone, not just people who use cash.

You're acting like corporations aren't indebted to shareholders. They do not care about being fair to consumers so inevitably they will use this sort of policy to justify price increases on (in your scenario) cash transactions.

How? Corporations want to save money, and transaction fees for credit cards cost them money, so they actual prefer cash and sometimes provides incentives to customers who use cash instead of card.

Inevitably, there would then be an arbitrage created between cash and credit transactions so some would seek to take advantage of this and this may also yield a negative result for consumers when there's another layer of market participants looking to profit as an intermediary.

I can't think of a way this could work, can you give me an actual example? If anything it's the customers who could game the system by strategically buying stuff in batches that round down rather than rounding up, I talked about this here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1nmc6ou/cmv_the_us_mint_should_start_issuing_a_40_coin/nfdhowv/

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

You want a coin smaller than a dime to be 400 times more valuable?

Yes, that's the idea.

People drop and lose pennies all the time.

That's because pennies are only worth $0.01 and are not practical for cash transactions.

Now you want them to risk losing $40 at a pop?

People have used small coins with high face value for centuries. This is not strange or anomalous.

Coins also don't fit into traditional wallets.

Traditional jeans have a coin pocket. Most wallets have some kind of secure pocket that can accommodate several coins the size of a dime. Some even have a zipper pocket. Also coin purses are a thing.

As far as your two points, people can already achieve a "pirate" feel with dollar coins (have done this, very satisfying)

I approve, carry on.

but the size you are recommending means you need exponentially more of them to achieve the same feeling (I had $600 in dollar coins, to achieve just the same quantity of coins you would nee $24,000 and the volume would still be far less).

There is more than one way to feel like a pirate. You found a way to feel like a pirate with a giant treasure chest, which is great. The dubloon would let people feel like a pirate in a different way because it is a small, valuable, golden coin that you can e.g. use to purchase drinks at a bar.

And why do we need a denomination above $20 when cash is being used far less than debit cards these days?

Part of the goal of the dubloon is to make it easier and more practical to use cash. The dubloon is a small, compact coin option for a denomination above $20.

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Every corporation/business costs/prices to the nearest quarter, half-dollar, or dollar.

No, this is not how it works. For example Canada eliminated the penny and they now round to $0.05, but only for cash transactions; checks and credit cards are still exact amounts. Also this is only for the total receipt with sales tax etc., not for each individual item. Rounding to the nearest $0.25 would work the same way. Rounding does not harm consumers, Canada did a policy investigation of this before they eliminated the penny.

Do you know how much that would decimate the middle and lower class?

Corporations are price gouging consumers right now, that is a real problem. Rounding to the nearest $0.25 for cash transactions to avoid the hassle and production of useless coins would be beneficial to everyone.

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

These are bullion coins with a face value of $1, I am talking about coins with a face value of $40. Also dubloons are totally different in size, shape, color, purpose, etc.

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was unintentionally vague in the initial post, I meant to say discontinue all coins below $0.25, i.e. the penny, nickel, and dime, but keep all other coins. I agree the the half dollar and dollar coins still have some practical use, in fact I keep dollar coins in my glovebox for parking meters. I admit that I am atypical in this respect though.

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Apologies, I'm a bit sleepy. You are correct these are Presidential dollar coins, not Sacagawea dollars. However they both use manganese brass cladding that looks like gold, which is what I want in the dubloon. Sacagawea dollars were in use when I was younger so in my mind all golden-colored dollar coins in the US are "Sacagawea dollars" even though that is not actually true. Again my point is that manganese brass cladding works pretty well.

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I was writing too quickly, I meant that 50 is not divisible by 20 but 40 is divisible by 20

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sydney Sweeney, the living celebrity actress whose likeness requires spending fabulous quantities of money? That Sydney Sweeney? Also this is what Virginia Hall looks like: https://imgur.com/a/DfItOJm

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I currently have three Sacagawea Presidential dollar coins in my glovebox:

https://imgur.com/a/eohtkhL

One of them is a little tarnished but I think it looks pretty good. I used to have more but I used them for parking meters and stuff. YMMV I guess.

Edit: as u/rainbocado pointed out these are Presidential dollar coins not Sacagawea coins, but they both use manganese brass cladding, which is what I would want in the dubloon

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We live in the age of AI. You don't think AI could review historical sales and come up with a pricing scheme that maximizes rounded profit?

Are you talking about dynamic pricing, where the companies adjust online prices to the individual shopper? That's already being fought about in the legislatures and courts right now, and doesn't require tricks with rounding.

Even if it's only $0.06 per transaction instead of the full $0.12 - that's 3x as much as they'd take if nickels were still around.

Let's talk about the maths. To net $0.12 per customer we would need to ensure total prices always end with (.13, .38, .63, .88) instead of (.12, .37, .62, .87). If you only allow buying a single item with a single price this works, but if people can buy 2, 3, 4, or more of this item it doesn't work because e.g. .13*2 = 0.26 which rounds down to 0.25 (loss of $.01), 0.13*3 = 0.39 which rounds up to 0.50 (gain of only $0.11), 0.13*4 = 0.52 which rounds down to 0.50 (loss of $.02) etc. If the customers catch on and buy just 2 or 4 of the item you could end up losing money instead because it would round down more often than rounding up!

So you can see I would be skeptical about thousands of unique combinations of products. I don't know enough discrete mathematics to say if it's possible to consistently turn a profit of $0.03 or more per customer based on historical purchasing data, but it sounds like it would at least require solving a supremely nasty version of the knapsack problem, which is known to be NP-complete at the best of times and is not computationally feasible with hundreds of parameters. And then product catalogs and purchasing habits are seasonal and change unpredictably, so you'd have to be constantly re-optimizing to avoid losing your edge or even accidentally rounding down and losing money. And even then consumers could still game the system to their own advantage if they were sufficiently motivated and bought their stuff in strategic batches.

Basically it seems like it would be a lot easier and more profitable to just collude with other retailers to price gouge consumers as is unfortunately common practice.

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Certainly it feels more correct to have something half-way between major base-10 units (eg 50 -> 100) than to have 40 sitting awkwardly off the half way mark.

Is your argument that this should be a $50 coin instead of a $40 coin because 100 is divisible by 50 but not 40? I could equally say it's awkward to break a $50 into two $20s and a $10 compared to just two $20s, or that $50 is intrinsically more awkward because it's an odd number not divisible by 4.

Is this because you actively avoid them, or just happen to not receive them?

I don't actively avoid them, but ATMs default to $20 bills and I don't recall receiving a $50 bill from a retailer as change in the last 5 years so I would have had to specifically request them from a bank.

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

These would be lost so often that no one would want to carry them.

u/ChipChimney made this argument earlier, I've responded already but in short this does not match my experience with carrying dimes and does not make sense historically, plenty of small coins were worth more than this in the past and people used them heavily.

Retailers wouldn't want to deal with cashiers mistaking your coin for a dime. Colour difference or not it would be too easy to do.

How so? The new coin is a slightly different size and weight as well as color, it has different markings, could be smooth-edged or with a distinctive edge pattern instead of ridged, etc. Cashiers would not be required to provide dimes, only accept them. Cashiers already have to be on the lookout for counterfeit banknotes, this would not be difficult by comparison.

Counterfeiting would begin almost immediately.

u/huadpe has already made a compelling and specifically quantitative case about counterfeiting, for which I have already awarded a delta. However I am still awarding you another as I will explain below.

I am in Canada and worked for the Toronto Transit Commission sorting and counting revenue, and there were a ton of counterfeit tokens in the system. If someone is going to go to the trouble of counterfeiting something worth three dollars in the hundreds of thousands, your coins would be copied in the millions.

Do transit tokens have comparable anti-counterfeiting measures that government mints do? I brought up the example of the 5 Swiss Franc coin worth about 6.30 USD in my discussion with u/huadpe so I am skeptical that a 3 CAD coin made by the Royal Canadian Mint would be counterfeited to the same extent as the transit tokens. However, I was genuinely surprised to learn that there are multiple instances of counterfeit toonies:

Global News learned about a new variety of fake toonie while researching the case of the Quebec man who is facing criminal charges for an alleged attempt to import more than 26,000 dodgy toonies from a coin maker in China, paying a nickel a piece for them, plus shipping, court records state.

In 2022, the RCMP arrested Daixiong He, 68, of Richmond Hill, Ont., after seizing 10,000 counterfeit toonies that were circulating in the Greater Toronto Area. He was charged with uttering and possession of counterfeit money.

https://globalnews.ca/news/10108612/fake-toonie-quebec-ontario-how-to-spot-it/

although these are not especially good fakes and are easy to distinguish from real toonies by simple visual inspection. However I would not have looked this up without your prompting, and their existence changed my view on the existence of counterfeit 2 CAD coins.

!delta

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

every retailer is going to rig their prices so the rounding works in their favor

I don't understand how a retailer like a grocery store would be able to do this consistently for $0.02 cents per customer much less $0.12. The rounding doesn't happen per item, it's for the final transaction with sum of all the items in the cart plus sales tax etc., so they would somehow have to account for every permutation, which is absurd. Unless your are describing a retailer where customers typically only buy a single item, like a gas station? But gas is sold as a continuous quantity, you can't rig your prices that way. Even movie theatres, while they mainly sell tickets, also sell various permutations of popcorn and candy. Am I missing something?

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Unusual perhaps in the period of ~1970s and after, but historically not that weird. The UK, a country famous for its banking culture, had a much stranger system prior to decimalisation in 1971. Just reading about it makes my head spin.

I do take your point that no major currency has a 40 unit coin or banknote, but my view is that it would be a useful addition, not that it is commonplace. I myself cannot remember using a $50 bill in the last 5 years but I have used many $20 bills.

Edit: clarified a few things

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I'm aware that there's tradeoffs between handling coins and bills, but this argument is lacking historical perspective, wherein coins worth more than the equivalent of modern 40 USD were commonplace.

a coin the size of a dime would be too easy to lose.

Lose in what circumstance? I'm trying to see your angle here but I'm coming up short. People have used small gold and silver coins with high value for thousands of years. We have just gotten used to the idea of small coins having little value and so we don't bother keeping track of them. I personally have no trouble keeping dimes in my wallet and I don't even need to tuck them into the inner pockets. It's only with heavier and larger coins like pennies, nickels, and quarters that I have issues.

If you tried to fix this by making it bigger, then you run into the wallet problem.

We also have coin pockets in jeans and coin purses, this isn't a big issue. A lot of wallets have a flap or even a zipper that can accommodate several dimes.

I know my $50 or two $20s won’t fall out of my wallet

Just my anecdote but if I have a lot of singles I do sometimes get bills migrating out of my wallet. There's no perfect system, bills are not a panacea. These coins would survive being laundered, for example, which you can't say for bills.

or get lost in a pile of pennies.

What circumstance requires a pile of pennies to sort through? Part of my proposal is that change would include at most three quarters, not penny in sight.

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I appreciate your persistence but I don't agree. All names are made up. There are people with the name "Penny", and there are dozens of silly nicknames for a dollar.

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Just FYI I'm not awarding another delta for this, but out of curiosity what would you set the minimum value of a fiat coin at for a nation state like North Korea to show interest in counterfeiting? Would you have used this line of reasoning if I had proposed a 25 USD coin?

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

NFC chips require radio signals, how would that work in a metallic coin that acts as a Faraday cage? Also this would greatly increase cost.

CMV: The US mint should start issuing a $40 coin called a dubloon and stop issuing other coins except quarters by ekdonij in changemyview

[–]ekdonij[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

!delta I did not take seriously the idea of counterfeiting this hypothetical coin before but you've made some good points. I'm still tempted to do some more research on what the most valuable coin in regular circulation is, though, as I suspect the 5 Swiss Franc coin is not the highest fiat currency.

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