On 24 Oct (a Wednesday in 2012) around 1258 hours, tian did utter:
> >
> >I had a mild obsession with moneyboxes as a kid - the adult echo of
> >which is that I have several plastic containers (formerly 1l bottled
> >fruit) for coins, set per denomination. I filled two of them with 20c
> >coins, and one with 50c coins... but the 10c is still going... almost
> >full!
> >
> Fascinating. We don't have 20c coins here. The 50c coin exists but not
> many people use it.
Our currency is fractal - ie, the denominations are always 1,2,5,
regardless if you're talking in cents, tens of cents, hundreds of cents,
thousands of cents... 10,000 cents ($100) is the current max. The only
places that currently down is that we got rid of 1 and 2c coins many years
ago.
My theory as to the relative non-use of the US 50c coin is that it's
simply not the most space-efficient way to carry 50 cents... it's nicer
to carry two quarters. Here, a 50c coin is preferable to two 20c and one
10c, (or any other variant which sums to 50c). for the record, AU 50c
coins are big (one of the largest coins in circulation in the world)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_fifty-cent_coin
...in fact, by and large, all Australian coins are large compared to
their US counterparts
> Many years ago I would put the change that was in
> my pocket when I got home in a peanut butter jar. The jar was full when
> I went through a period of unemployment. One of the things I found out
> was that retailers rebel when you try and use lots of small change to
> buy anything. Since then I've carried a coin purse and recycled change
> as fast as it came in. That means no emergency stash, but oh well...
Gold coins ($1 and $2) stay in my coin purse. Silver shrapnel
(5,10,20,50) all go into moneyboxes at home. At one point I had a jar of
20c in the freezer - it was "cold hard cash". When I added a second jar,
that was "frozen assets". By the time I got to a third jar, I decided to
abandon that... :)
.../nemo