Something like The Crown Jewels in the UK? Or art stashed in Vatican City?
Would a trillion $ coin made of platinum be the size of a manhole cover, a pizza, a pancake, or what?
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Ooh, who wouldn’t want to pay their parking fines in pennies?
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Since the Canadian one-dollar-coin had a picture of a loon on it and was nicknamed the “loonie”, I was heartbroken when the two-dollar-coin did not have two loons. The most logical nickname would’ve been “doubloon”, and I dearly wanted to live in a country that had doubloons as an actual circulating coin.
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According to this blog post from 2019, all platinum mined in the world to date would fit in a cube 7.7 meters long, and it would be worth only $6.4 billion.
Trying to make something worth $1 trillion from tangible materials is a fool’s errand. Instead, you should mint a trillion dollar coin that is about the size of one Nvidia Corporation, or about a third of Apple Inc.
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Do U.S. banks not have the equivalent of CoinStar machines like they have here in the UK?
I have an old cider bottle full of pocket shrapnel I fully intend to take to the bank. I just tip the unsorted coins into the tray a bit at a time, they go in and get spun and separated, some get rejected but the rest are valued and at the end I’ll get a chit for the cash value. Queue up to see a bank teller, use my card to access my bank account, hand over chit and the value is added to my account. No counting, no rolling, no counterfeits, coins go back into circulation and I have the money.
Probably have about £40 or £50 in that jar by now…
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In the Euro area, businesses are not required to accept payment that consists of more than 50 euro coins (regardless of denomination – the highest-value Euro coin being €2, that would cap coin-only transactions at €100). They can also rule out accepting coins at all.
Of course, since all Euro coins are legal tender all over the Euro zone, and each member country gets to issue its own coins – one side is standardised and countries are free to design the other one –, plus various sorts of commemorative coins (usually €2), keeping track of what coins are actually in circulation can get quite confusing. In addition, some countries such as Finland or the Netherlands have virtually abolished the 1-cent and 2-cent coins: They don’t mint them anymore, all prices are rounded to multiples of 5 cents, and while in theory you can still use 1-cent and 2-cent coins from other countries to pay for stuff, in practice they’re not accepted everywhere. This means that 1-cent and 2-cent coins from these countries are becoming rare.
Belgium wanted to mint a €2 coin to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo but France took exception to that, so Belgium produced a bunch of €2,50 coins instead (which is allowed; any Euro-zone country is free to issue new coins in non-standard denominations), but these are legal tender only in Belgium.
Euro banknotes, however, have to be accepted in arbitrary amounts unless there are specific laws or contractual agreements to the contrary.
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My credit union has a coinstar machine that is free to use. We usually gather up all the loose change in the house and cars and cash it in before beach trips.
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Well Doubloon was one of the contenders. There was a national survey at the time for what to call it. Toonie won by inertia, though I don’t actually remember which one won the actual survey. I remember Toonie and Doubloonie were on the list, and I think there was a third one too.
Canada has toyed seriously with a $5 coin a few times now as well. It’s sort of a race to see which happens first- the elimination of bills, or the arrival of a cashless society. 
Paper bills cost the system a lot more than coins do because of how quickly they wear out, so it makes rational sense to eliminate them. There’s a trade off though where people don’t want to carry around three pounds of metal in their wallets. I think we have a pretty good compromise right now.
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The gall of these people. I mean, it’s their right, but they expect someone to do all the sorting work, find buyers for the valuable coins, and dispose of the non-valuable coins (even after they failed to sell them for the copper value). How long will that take? At one coin per second, that will take $4300 at minimum wage. Hopefully someone already has a machine to do this, which is their only viable buyer.
On top of that, they expect that person to assume the risk of whatever value is in those bags. That’s a big ask. I hope they get $5k for it, but that’s a stretch.
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I have plenty of coins in my desk drawer that I’m selling for $1 trillion each. The problem is I haven’t found anybody willing to pay me $1 trillion for any of them.
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This reminds me… I was in Venezuela in ~2006, before the Bolivar was replaced with the Bolivar Forte, a 1000 to 1 revaluation. For some reason I had to pay out of pocket for a week of my hotel expenses, to be re-imbursed by the company I was working at.
I thought I was getting USD back, but was handed a bag full of Bs (the old ones) instead. Which were OK while I was in the country, but not worth the effort to bring home.
I recall spreading them out on my hotel bed and sending a picture to my wife, announcing I was a Venezuelan millionaire. She was real excited until I explained what they were worth at home.
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They sound lazy. There are machines for less than 200 dollars that will count the pennies into rolls. If there are teenage family members ask them do and let them keep a portion of the free money.
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I’m all for a 5$ coin, as long as it’s not much bigger or heavier than the Toonie.
Challenge: Loonie, Toonie, ???-nie?
As for paper bills… aren’t all our bills plastic now?
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The other thing - something I don’t do but could see a younger me doing - is that you can go out with just bills and toss your change in a container when you get home. Then every month you’ve got fun money.
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They have that if they’d just hold on to the haul and convert one bag each month at CoinStar. It would still be the same amount of physical labor, but spread out over time with plenty of rest in between visits. 
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In Italy, anything paid for in bills has an upper limit of 10,000.00 euro, above that you must do a bank transfer, not sure if this is just an Italian rule though.
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Yah, figure of speech, there. The plastic bills are pretty cool, I think. All full of windows and holograms and stuff.
I’ve thought a lot about what to call the five-oonie and have no good ideas yet. I hope I won’t be in charge of naming it.
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Yeah, or even, there’s a machine at our grocery store. I’d just get in the habit of bringing a bag each week when I do my shopping and getting the equivalent in store credit.
But then again, I wouldn’t operate on the assumption that there were extra valuable coins in there. Or, if there are, I’d be happy to pass them along to the lucky sap that finds them. After all, it was basically free money, right? Other than the hassle of having to clean out a home. But that’s pretty common to those of us with parents, and it’s pretty rare to find a stash of cash at all, let alone $8k.
Alternately, have any of you ever gotten into snapping pennies? I used to be able to make them hum. This stash would be a lifetime supply!
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Pentaloons.
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Totally worth building a little coin-sorter/hopper rig with a couple of cameras to photograph each coin, OCR the date, and set aside fancy ones!
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