10 ms·

Well, in the US maybe time to eliminate the 1, 5 and maybe 10 cent coins ? Yes, the 1 cent coins have little copper, but multiple millions are produced per yea

• ravenstine 4y ago
  Not much copper in those unless you collect pre-1982 pennies. New pennies have such a thin layer of copper plating that separating that would be more trouble than it's worth. EDIT: Darn, can't delete now. Yes I agree, the penny should be eliminated to save on copper.
  • jmclnx 4y ago
    true, but with the number of these made each years, they add up. Plus all these do is cost everyone money to handle (banks, shops and even the Gov).
• brtkdotse 4y ago
  Is physical currency still common in the US? I haven’t used physical currency in probably 5-6 years, outside the 10 SEK the tooth fairy leaves.
  • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    Come to Austria. The entire country revolves around cash. I rarely see someone pay with card at the supermarket and it's most likely a foreigner. Small shops and cafes don't even take cards, only cash and the rare time they do it's only for larger sums. Also tips are common almost everywhere.
    • fmakunbound 4y ago
      What's the reasons for that?
      • jbverschoor 4y ago
        Same reason people DuckDuckGo. They have a stronger connection to the history of snooping on civilians
      • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        Easier tax fraud mostly to keep your illicitly gained money away from the taxman. Plus conservative population that is skeptical about new tech and strongly keeps outdated ways of working and doing business (visible in any company there). Letters are common as well and digitalization is pretty weak. Like what's the last tech product you remember that came out of Austria?
    • givemeethekeys 4y ago
      I've heard similar about Germany (someone from Germany, please chime in). There's a lovely under-appreciated privacy about using cash.
      • sva_ 4y ago
        Cash is still king in Germany, but use of "contactless" payment methods have drastically increased in the pandemic. Small shops often prefer or only take cash, or accept card payment only from a certain amount due to fees of the processors. I heard small businesses prefer cash for tax reasons as well.
        • benmanns 4y ago
          Tax reasons means evading taxes by not reporting cash transactions.
          • sva_ 4y ago
            Captain obvious saves the day.
          • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
            And why should we enable small business tax fraud? I can't ask my employer to pay me in cash and keep my payslips private from the government.
      • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        It's also super annoying to wait in line at the supermarket until all banknotes, coins and pennies are exchanged and counted between each customer and the supermarket employee vs paying by card wich takes 2-5s. It adds up to minutes wasted nearly every day.and probably weeks/months over a lifetime. Plus the CO2 to transport cash back and forth. But most seriously, cash payments enable tons of tax fraud, especially by business owners in the hospitality industry, making it unfair to those with jobs who pay nearly half their salary in tax, while Gastro owners will buy another Porsche or vacation home from the taxes they dodged thanks to cash payments. I hope they ban cash, it's annoying, time wasting, environmentally unfortunately and makes life super easy for tax fraudsters to the detriment of those who have to pay their taxes fairly. The privacy reason is some hypocritical bullshit, as those same people using exclusively cash, carry privacy invasive Apple/Android phones and constantly use spying services of Google, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Tinder, Snapchat, etc. The real "privacy" they're referring to means privacy from the taxman for their illicit financial gains, a.k.a. tax fraud. That's the real reason, and I hope it gets cracked down.
    • brnt 4y ago
      I learned to avoid lines with old people in France, because they will be paying with cash or even worse, cheques. Yes, I've heard all about the benefits of cash on HN, but the millions of man years saved by not standing in line has to be worth something too. One Auchan was boasting that they got line time down to 4 minutes. In NL, anythng longer than 30 seconds is unusual.
      • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        NL is a more modern country with a forward thinking population. Germany and Austria are more backwards and conservative. If you come to Austrian supermarkets at rush hour, the lines will last several minutes. It not uncommon to hear disgruntled customers (usually old people ironically) yell at supermarket employees to open another till after waiting for ages.
      • deleted 4y ago
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  • overtonwhy 4y ago
    Mostly only required for drugs and gambling these days.
  • noah_buddy 4y ago
    I carry cash almost entirely to tip servers and other service industry employees in cash. One Americanism for another, huh? But that’s only bills, no coinage.
    • jeltz 4y ago
      On Sweden we usually tip with the same method of payment as we paid the bill with.
      • noah_buddy 4y ago
        I usually pay credit and tip cash because I expect more of it to make it to the servers and kitchen staff and less to the owner/none to CC companies.
      • kwhitefoot 4y ago
        You tip in Sweden? Who do you tip, and why? And why them and not others such as the cashier in a supermarket or a bus driver?
        • eru 4y ago
          > And why them and not others such as the cashier in a supermarket or a bus driver? Culture?
  • kube-system 4y ago
    It depends on what side of town you're on. There is a big class and culture gap in the US financial system. Everyone on this forum from the US likely is well banked. But a large chunk of the US is not. A large number of people either do not meet the requirements (undocumented immigrants), distrust the system, or don't meet minimum balance requirements (or don't want to deal with those requirements). https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/08/25percent-of-us-households-are-either-unbanked-or-underbanked.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/08/25percent-of-us-households-a... https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984475870/unbanked-what-it-means-to-be-outside-of-the-banking-system https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984475870/unbanked-what-it-me...
    • nradov 4y ago
      Prepaid debit cards are now widely used by unbanked people in the US. Some employers will even do direct deposit to those cards.
      • kube-system 4y ago
        This is true, but cash is still widely used by the unbanked as well. Go to a grocery store in a poor part of town and you will see plenty of cash being handled at the checkouts.
    • jeltz 4y ago
      Minimum balance requirements? Why is that a thing?
      • kube-system 4y ago
        Banks make money by lending on deposits. If you have no deposits, they can't make any money. Although, almost universally, banks will allow you to pay a few dollars per month for your account instead. But, people who don't have very much money usually don't have much of a need to spend spend money for a service to hold on to their money, because they don't have any.
        • 4y ago
  • timoteostewart 4y ago
    I don't see Sweden on this historical tracker of money left by the tooth fairy. The current U.S. average of $5.50 would be 55 SEK! https://www.deltadental.com/us/en/tooth-fairy/the-original-poll.html https://www.deltadental.com/us/en/tooth-fairy/the-original-p...
  • MichaelCollins 4y ago
    I use it pretty much every day. Almost all restaurants and stores have an ATM, and when not, there's always one somewhere nearby. For me it's a matter of principle, I use cash because I want businesses to continue accepting cash. I have credit cards and I sometimes use them out of laziness (or for anything over $200 or so, or online...) But if a business refuses cash then I'll refuse to do business with them, because I think they're disenfranchising people who don't have credit cards and I won't support that. Thankfully this is fairly rare.
    • kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      > Almost all restaurants and stores have an ATM You should never use a private ATM. They are prime targets for skimmers.
  • mikewarot 4y ago
    Internet isn't quite reliable in the US, it's good to have some cash on hand in the event things go down. I tip in cash, so that taxes aren't taken out of an already underpaid person's "wages".
    • Hfdlmsh 4y ago
      Bad news, it is presumed they were tipped upon which they are taxed.
• stevenjgarner 4y ago
  The copper penny hoarders are beating you to it [0]. I met a "retired" guy who is driving around the US buying boxes of pennies from banks sorting them into copper or not. He sells the sorted copper pennies to penny hoarders [1] and uses the non-copper pennies to spend at the Walmart NCR cash registers (they have to love him). He said he does not get rich but makes enough to get by. We went out for a meal and discussed the feasibility of sorting the pennies by date using ML. The real gold mine would be that an AI approach might potentially identify numismatic grade pennies and really pay for itself. [0] https://www.wikihow.com/Hoard-Copper-Pennies https://www.wikihow.com/Hoard-Copper-Pennies [1] https://moneyning.com/make-money/how-to-cash-in-your-pennies-for-more-than-a-cent/ https://moneyning.com/make-money/how-to-cash-in-your-pennies...
  • shrubble 4y ago
    There are slight differences in weight between the 1982 and later, and the copper containing pennies. You don't need to use ML, you need a comparator of the kind found in 1000s of vending machines.
    • OJFord 4y ago
      ML's just a comparator where the designer doesn't (necessarily) understand the logic, right?
      • loa_in_ 4y ago
        If you have an universal constructor, yes, it's going to be a problem that solves itself. In practice you need a high fidelity weight sensor and a handful of transistors.
    • dehrmann 4y ago
      What if we ran that ML on the etherium network?
  • MichaelCollins 4y ago
    Codyslab sorting copper pennies using magnetic inductance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gM9mOk6eb8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gM9mOk6eb8 Seems very simple and low tech.
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  is that a large enough driver of demand?
• sva_ 4y ago
  I'm actually quite fond of the 25 cent coins I got from the US. They work in shopping carts here (you have to put a coin into a shopping cart to get it, and you get the coin back after you bring it back, but they usually only accept 1 or 2 euro. I'm much more likely to still have the quarter, since I can't spend it here.) I got bunch of coins when I had to use a laundromat in the US once, they only accepted quarters. Exchange $20 at a different machine and get a ton of metal. I suppose its like legacy software.
  • gerdesj 4y ago
    Back in the late '70/early '80s the UK 10p coin was similar enough in size and weight to fool some German vending machines as a "1 DM" coin (Deutchmark). The rough rule of thumb rate of exchange was 1 GBP to 4 DM back then.
    • sva_ 4y ago
      A large number of European vending machines still accept the 10 thai baht coin as a 2 Euro coin (10 baht are approx. 30 cents). I heard the newer machines use a combination of methods, including weight and electrical resistance to test if a coin is actually the right one.
• light_hue_1 4y ago
  > Yes, the 1 cent coins have little copper, but multiple millions are produced per year Billions are produced per year, not millions. The mint makes on average 10 billion pennies per year, https://qz.com/1318203/making-pennies-costs-the-us-mint-millions/ https://qz.com/1318203/making-pennies-costs-the-us-mint-mill... Varies by year. It is still a totally irrelevant amount of copper. One penny has 2.95g of copper in it. 10 billion pennies have 30,000 tons of copper in them. Worldwide copper production is 20 million tons. 0.015% of the world's copper is used for pennies. That's a rounding error. Just because a number is big, doesn't mean it matters. Sure. Get rid of the penny. But not because it will impact our copper supply in any way.
  • sixstringtheory 4y ago
    Still, I care less about relative quantities and more about what can be produced with the absolute amount at hand. How many houses, cars or circuit boards could be made with 30,000 tons a year? There’s always some bigger problem you can point to that seems to render the point at hand useless, but as they say, 30K tons of copper saved is 30K tons of copper earned.
    • light_hue_1 4y ago
      > Still, I care less about relative quantities and more about what can be produced with the absolute amount at hand This attitude is exactly why our planet is dying. Instead of investing time and effort into things that matter, people become hyper-focused on worthless things that have no impact. Like measures to conserve a trivial amount of water at home. It's a poisonous and wasteful way to think. > There’s always some bigger problem you can point to that seems to render the point at hand useless That's simply not true. We have real problems to solve. The numbers are clear. This isn't one of them.
  • walnutclosefarm 4y ago
    I believe you've misplaced a decimal in your conclusion. 30,000 is 0.15% of 20,000,000, not .015%. Still pretty insignificant, though.
• tedunangst 4y ago
  What percentage of US copper consumption is devoted to penny production?
  • tomnipotent 4y ago
    All new pennies since 1983 are 98% zinc.
• JoshuaDavid 4y ago
  The US mints about 8 billion pennies per year, which at 2.5g each and 2.5% copper, works out to about 500 metric tons of copper. Add in nickels (1.5B x 5g x 75% copper = 5600 metric tons), dimes (3B x 2.2g x 92% copper = 6100 metric tons Cu), and quarters (2.5B x 5.7g x 92% copper = 13000 metric tons copper). Which works out to just over 25000 metric tons of copper per year used in US coinage. About 2 million metric tons of copper are used in the US per year. So all coinage represents about 1.25% of US copper consumption, of which quarters are about half. There are some good reasons to eliminate small coinage, but "it will noticeably help with a copper shortage" isn't really one of them.
  • rowanG077 4y ago
    Huh? 1.25% seems incredibly significant to me. That can be the difference between a shortage and no shortage.
    • eru 4y ago
      Doesn't seem very significant to me. But it's a much higher percentage than I would have expected.
  • pfdietz 4y ago
    The US mint also destroys old coins, so you need to know the net production.