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FYI http://www.bankofcanada.ca/banknotes/

Although I have to say, the 10kg coin is cooler: http://www.mint.ca/store/mint/learn/10-kilo-coin-6500002

the Royal Canadian Mint (the federal agency that prints Canadian paper currency and stamps Canadian coins)

"do the Canadian mints sell uncirculated collector sets like the US mints?"

Why, yes, they do. Pretty much every coin set gets proof mint sets and uncirculated sets are available. Here's the catalogue.

Note: I believe all the poppy quarters have been sold out. You will have to look to coin dealers to purchase one now.

Just released, from the Royal Canadian Mint:
http://www.mint.ca/royalcanadianmintpublic/index.a spx?requestedPath=/en-CA/Home/default.htm

    Or to quote wikipedia: "On May 3, 2007, the Royal Canadian Mint unveiled a Gold Maple Leaf coin with a face value of One Million Dollars, though the gold content was worth over $2 million at the time. It measures 50 cm in diameter by 3 cm thick and weighs 100 kilograms, with a purity of 99.999%."

      100 Kilograms equals roughly 220 pounds. Sadly however, it is doubtful that coin would fit in most American vending machines.

It would be even more obvious to visit The Royal Canadian Mint's website and check its information on commemorative and other coins.

Um, no, Tim Horton's is not the mint.

I think that might be where I got my first one as well though :)

Well, my interest was piqued, so I looked up the release dates of our various coins...

Toonie: 1996
Loonie: 1987

So my memory was WAY off base here. We've had our loonies for almost 20 years already!

Source

Hey, at least we don't have a loon on our Money, at least not Yet.

The Canadian mint changes the design on the reverse of the quarter very frequently. The more quarters leave circulation, the higher it pushes the canadian dollar. See..

They can have a non-GPL licence to my 2 lines for the sum of 151699.029 pounds (weight) of Canada Gold Maple Leaf coins.

Yeah, they seem to be like the Royal Canadian Mint, who produces both circulation coins and collectible coins. And their silver double-image hologram $20 coin looks quite cool.

Yeah, they seem to be like the Royal Canadian Mint, who produces both circulation coins and collectible coins. And their silver double-image hologram $20 coin looks quite cool.

You're right.. the queen's head does kind look like a polar bear head.

However, it's the Bluenose on the back of our dimes and a polar bear on the back of our two dollar coin (or twooney). See for yourself here

Monte writes:

> Why would a mint operate at a loss? What possible reason could they have
> for spending six cents to make a nickel?

I'm sorry Monte, you are entirely correct on this. As qintar was kind enough to point out in a subsequent followup post, I was indeed mistaken, at least where U.S. Currency was concerned. I grew up in Canada, and from what I remember of a tour of the Royal Canadian Mint when I was a young child, the cost to produce a penny there had managed to exceed its face value.

Interestingly, the Royal Canadian Mint *did* re-work the materials in their pennies such that they were no longer pure copper, thus reducing their unit cost. Perhaps they got pennies into the profitable range again. I tried finding out the current productions costs at The Royal Canadian Mint but was unsuccessful.

As to why they might produce a coin at a higher cost than the face value: Again, I'm supposing that if the sole client was the government of the country that holds the minting and stamping operation, and the cost of the coin could be justified as amortized over a number of years of predicted average use, then it might make fiscal sense.

> And would you be interested in buying this nice new twenty dollar bill
> for the low, low price of $35.99? Hell, I'll even autograph it!

Sorry, I'm not a soverign nation or a coin/bill collector. Nice try though! :-)

Trying desperately to drag this back onto the original topic though: If they smart-chip money, how are they going to handle the break in chain of hands when the smart-currency trades hands through one or more private individuals? I can understand businesses being equipped to take in funds, and if they know the identity of the person they're receiving the funds from adding that person's id and their own to the funds trail, but if they don't know, or the person refuses, all they can do is add their own ID.

What prevents bills from changing hands between several private individuals?

1. Bill printed/initialized (gods that sounds odd) date/time
2. Passed to: Bank of America, St. Louis Missouri ATM # xxxxxx date/time
3. Passed to: John Q. Public SSN xxx-xx-xxxx date/time
4. Passed to: Mr. Submarine # xxxxxx date/time
5. Passed to: Jack Priest (imagine he's really a priest)
6. Depositied by Bazooka Showgirls, Kansas City Missouri date/time

See the problem here? Between (5) and (6), the bill actually exchanged hands from Jack to Dave, then Sarah, then Andy, then Bob, then Mark, then Me who went to Bazooka Showgirls and stuck it in some nice dancer's g-string, but the trail shows that Jack Priest was the last person to handle it before Bazooka Showgirls depositied it. Whoops. Sorry about that smudge on your character that came out when you were called as a character witness in that rape trial. Pity about justice denied. I'm sure they'll work out these glitches ... someday.