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548 points andrewl | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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Night_Thastus ◴[] No.45903609[source]
I'd say screw it, get rid of nickles and dimes as well. Quarters can stay, for now.

It's a complete waste of money and time continuing to mint such low-value currency. It can't be used for just about anything.

Unfortunately, I do see the problem with part of this. For a handful of items where it does matter, it will force people to use cards more if they want to avoid rounding. And the card providers already have a choke-hold on retailers, and the whole thing is basically a scheme that funnels money from the poor to the wealthy via interest and fees on the consumer, interchange fees, and rewards programs.

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toast0 ◴[] No.45904307[source]
Nickles are likely to go shortly after. You can do everything you can with nickles with dimes and quarters, nickles have worse economics than pennies, and have had their minting suppressed below the market needs for years. Once pennies leave circulation, the problems with nickles will become urgent and they'll quickly leave.

Dimes are small and cheap to make though, so they'll probably stick around.

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1. frankus ◴[] No.45907781[source]
Rounding to a nickel has the advantage that's it's both simple (1, 2, 6, and 7 round down; 3, 4, 8, and 9 round up) and fair (there's no systematic bias in favor of the buyer or seller).

Dimes need to deal with how to round numbers ending in 5, making them unfair, or (with a more elaborate system of looking at both digits) complicated.

Quarters (being an odd value) are fair, but kind of a nightmare to memorize all of the values that round up or down (1–12, 26–37, 51–62, and 76–87 round down; 13–24, 38–49, 63–74, and 88–99 round up; and I'm not even sure I don't have an error in those numbers).

Also it's awkward if a higher-valued coin (e.g. quarters) isn't divisible by the least valuable coin (e.g. a dime)