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Comment by rbritton | Hacker News Reader

Coins seem largely used anymore for tax. How common would any coin smaller than a quarter be without a percentage-based sales tax? Virtually every price is close to either the $.50 or the $.00 mark -- it's the tax that creates the need for more combinations of change.

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Vending machines would be problematic.

Most soda machines are charging $0.60 or $0.65 these days. Rounding to either $0.50 or $0.75 would be annoying.

That said, I think it'd be totally reasonable to eliminate all coins other than the nickel and quarter.

(If I really had my way, I'd also eliminate dollar bills (replacing with a dollar coin that doesn't suck, replace with some more valuable and small.... like dime-sized pure copper. Then eliminate all bills except the $5, $20, and $100).

I was with you until you wanted to eliminate cash in favor of more coins. How is someone supposed to carry those in their wallet? Many use thin wallets or money clips for card/ID/cash. Plus if I'm leaving someone a tip, I'm sure they'd hate to have their pockets jingling while they serve food or valet. Cash is also a lot easier to count, flip through, harder to lose.

The entire EU eurozone manages to do it. There's a 1 Euro note, but I've never seen it and as far as I know nobody uses it. Using 1 and 2 euro coins works great. I personaly just keep them in my pocket. I don't think jingling is a real problem.

Same goes for the UK and the pound. Nobody uses 1 pound notes.

Worth noting: the lack of tip culture in the EU as per the previous poster's example. A waiter being tipped 1$ coins each night would add up quickly.

It's common to tip a euro or two for your meal in Italy.

There have never been €1 notes, and £1 notes in England were withdrawn in 1988 in favour of the coin.

(£1 notes still exist in Scotland, but since 2001 are only issued in small numbers for collectors.)

I'd be happy with only going down as far as quarter dollars. There's a convenience store in the lobby of my building and the guy prices everything rounded to the nearest quarter. It makes everything faster and easier.

> Most soda machines are charging $0.60 or $0.65 these days. Rounding to either $0.50 or $0.75 would be annoying.

The soda machines I see charge $1.25. Where are you?

Cans, not bottles

Sure, but there are no can-based soda vending machines around here.

With that argument you could be loosing fractions of cents even today! Why don't we have coins for fractions of cents?

round(total price + tax) is the obvious solution to this. If you gain or loose 3 cents in the round off who cares.

Here is how other countries solved this ages ago https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_rounding

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