Slashdot Mirror
Melting Coins Now Illegal In the U.S.
A number of readers have noted the action by the U.S. Mint to outlaw the melting down or bulk export of coins. This has come about because the value of the precious metals contained in coins now exceeds their face value.
The Mint would rather not have to replace pennies (at a cost of 1.73 cents per) or nickels (at 8.74 cents). The expectation is that Congress will mandate new compositions for some U.S. coins in 2007.
They stopped making em out of copper before the 50's (I forget exactly when its finals week XD)
they make them out of an electroplated nickel alloy now..
Dare i say it shouldn't just be oil we should be concerned about running out?
JUNK METAL coins are now worth more than their face value... I think this is a sign that asteroid mining could be feasible (the average nickel iron monster is worth several trillian.. not counting any incidental precious metals)
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
As much as I can understand why they do not want people melting down these coins, how much is the metal really worth in it's "raw" form unrefined?
About 1.7 cents for a current penny, about 2.3cents for a pre-1986 penny, about 7.5 cents for a nickel.
www.wavefront-av.com
Well, the Mint doesn't do anything with $1 bill or any bill for that matter. That would be the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. The Mint does the coins and Bureau of Engraving and Printing does the paper.
That said, I'm pretty much supportive of nuking the penny, making $1 a coin, and creating a $5 coin (but keeping the bill). But thats just my $2.
My second question is how much would it cost to refine these metals to make them worth the most? Copper prices are sky high right now but a lump of melted pennies probably wouldn't be able to be sold as a "copper" since there are a number of other metals involved. Is this something that can really be profitable?
That's a really great question. The deal is, at least for silver and gold coins - they are kept in their coin form but traded at or near melt value. There are several reasons for this. First, a US coin (silver dime/quarter/half/dollar), or penny or nickel, will have a known alloy. You _know_ that this object is, say, 90% silver, or 90% gold, or 95% copper. You don't have to have it assayed for purity to find out what it's got; the mint took care of that when it was made.
Another reason to leave them in coin form, is that people _do_ collect the coins at a premium to the melt value. I've been buying "junk silver" coins for years, going through them, picking out the good ones, and selling 'em on eBay. Once found a silver half in a junk silver buy, that I sold for $230 or so over there. If ya melt them into ingots, they're just not as interesting. Coins are also easier to count, store, handle, and so on. Bulk metals investing, sure, go buy that 100 ounce silver bar, but it's a BIG chunk of money to swing at one time in either direction - can't just sell a roll of silver quarters and get 100 bucks, or whatever. Coins are a convenient form factor to have them in, so melting costs don't enter into it - because they're rarely melted.
Now for copper, which is a base metal and used widely in industry, melting would probably happen more often. The spot market would then reflect this, and when copper gets to the point where it's worth melting, this regulation may be gone and a spot market will develop with prices to reflect processing costs. It all evens out in the end. In the meantime, 20% or so of the circulating pennies in this part of the country are the 95% copper type. If only there were some way to distinguish them automatically using an electromagnetic signature or something (ahem), one could sort them at a rate of 5 coins per second, store the copper, turn in the zinc ones, and play the numbers. The ban on melting screws that up a bit...
And to blow your mind even further, the judicial branch makes law too! It's called common law. The federal judiciary and 49 of the 50 states operate under common law. If you don't like it, you have to move to Louisiana or France.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_(currency)
The price of zinc has gone up - which is what the penny is mostly made of.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
That assumes that there is still something exportable still being made in America. As a nation, we've worked HARD to destroy our entire manufacturing and agricultural base.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
These folks sure act like it's been illegal for a while now. In terms of cutting up a US coin and sell it for more, it's illegal, but not often enforced. Just like Speed Limit laws where it's illegal to drive faster then a particular speed, but is flaunted regularly.
Kirby
Time to start melting Canadian cents for all your copper-reclaimation needs -- 98% copper until 1996.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
youre talking to a certified economist who is essentially done with the relevant courses at a top 20 institution.... who also happens to be on his 36th hour awake doing mind numbing research, papers, and studying for finals.
Wow.. I made a mistake which, though avoidable, was not a high enough priority to me to avoid.
Maybe I should be shot?
seriously.. for all i know you could be just as tired and grumpy as i am.. but the attack was unnecessarily vicious.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
A devalued dollar has one particularly pernicious side effect: we're no longer _the_ money to invest in. Right now our economy is largely propped up by the fact that countries buy dollars because dollars are good, stable things to have, rather than anything they particularly want to spend dollars on.
Should people decide that, say, the euro is a safer place for their money, the US government will have to raise the prices it pays to borrow money, and the economy overall will suffer a serious squeeze.
But the cheaper dollars would make it easier to buy back all that old debt we'd sold. It could be the beginning of a substantial re-balancing of the US economy, albeit with a side order of massive pain along the way.
Err... no.
Every nation that has done this rounds to the nearest nickel, not the next highest.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
This is a classic 'net argument. Long story short, the destruction of currency *with intent to defraud* is illegal.
7 334
... well, until this law was passed.
There's a great google answer here:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=7
"You are correct, that the only criminal statute regulating the destruction or defacement of U.S. currency requires fraudulent intent."
There are a few famous classroom science experiments that involve the destruction of pennies. Here's hoping that's still legal.
Those are illegal. It's just that no one actually cares enough to enforce it.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Read up on administrative law. Administrations created by congress (FAA, FCC, SEC, Mint, etc) can pass rules that are binding as federal law. It is part of their charter as federal administrative bodies.
Those are illegal. It's just that no one actually cares enough to enforce it.
It's only illegal if you intend to use/distribute them as 'money'. Novelty items are OK.
(Text as of 2/19/02) 18 U.S.C. 331:
Whoever fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates, impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales or lightens any of the coins coined at the mints of the United States, or any foreign coins which are by law made current or are in actual use or circulation as money within the United States;
http://crummysocks.com
The US military overseas has done away with pennies in all use except the Post Office. Round the register price up or down as needed. Works just fine.
Actually, I'm guilty of not reading my google answer link in full.
2 6715
"You are correct, that the only criminal statute regulating the destruction or defacement of U.S. currency requires fraudulent intent." only applies to *coins*
Further down, there's a statute related to bills, which our researcher
"Note that this is also an intent-based crime. An element of the offense is "...intent to render such [currency] unfit to be reissued.""
So lighting your cigar with a bill might just be illegal after all. However, under these laws, dissolving a penny in acid isn't.
There's a bit more here:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=4
Most of the laws in this country are made by federal and state executive agencies.
Okay, but federal executive agencies can only make laws pertaining to those areas in which the legislative branch has delegated to them the authority to make laws.
The Federal Communications Commission, for example, could not establish a law increasing the penalty for possession of marijuana -- it is not in their jurisdiction.
The question, then, is whether the Department of the Treasury is authorized by Congress to prevent citizens from removing currency from the market by destroying or exporting it. The answer, as far as I can tell, is Yes.
Getting rid of pennies has nothing to do with getting rid of cents. The two are distinct. Most banks already handle transactions down to the 6th decimal place. My bank account at any given time could have a certain number of thousandths of a cent in it. The only time it has to be converted into coins is when I withdraw it. Getting rid of the penny just means that physical money transactions have to be rounded. The same thing happened when we got rid of the 1/2 cent piece. When you buy something and the total comes to a non-nickel-aligned amount, it gets rounded. Easy, simple, any idiot can handle the math.
Australia manages just fine.
:) you pay to the exact cent. Actual prices are still specified to individual cents, the rounding is done on the total purchase not on each individual item.
You just round to the nearest 5 cents. If something costs $13.23 then you end up paying $13.25 if you pay cash, if it costs $13.27 then you also pay $13.25 if you pay cash. When paying by EFTPOS (think swiping your debit card in the US) or credit card or cheque (think check it the US
It works perfectly well, sure you can get 2c worth of free petrol (gas...) by putting $40.02 in the tank, but no one does because it's 2c... Sure you could try buying 2c (or 7c) worth of petrol over and over again, but no one does that either because it's retarded.
Just because you remove something from cash transactions doesn't mean you change the "base" of your currency - to claim that is just being moronic. Amazingly Australia didn't collapse, the banks didn't have a field day with "false" interest rates, in fact the only thing that changed is you don't end up carrying 10kg of coins at the end of the day...
Inflation means that a penny now is a *much* *much* finer resolution on prices. People managed perfectly well 50 years ago with a much coarser price scheme... Seriously who gives a stuff if something costs $12.32 or $12.33 - can you even tell the difference at the end of week?
On another note, kudos for linking to the Straight Dope (great site).
Read my blog posts on usability.
It isn't just a decrease in the value of a dollar, it's also an increase in the value of the metals.
Shadus
've worked in the USA, Europe and the UK. I've never had a bank account with more than 2 decimal places. What's more, I work on business & accounting software, and the only times I've seen that use a resolution finer than what's available in the local currency is for highly specialised functions - and even then, it's only for internal, intermediate calculations.
You really need to get out more. Gasoline, cheap electronics parts like resistors, mutual fund values... lots of stuff is accounted for at greater than 2 decimal point accuracy.
Say you're buying a $5.23 lunch, five days a week. You're actually paying $5.25 a day.Sure, but your morning coffee costs $1.82. You're actually paying $5.25+$1.80=$5.23+$1.82 a day.
You conveniantly ignore all the occassions you buy a $5.27 lunch and save 2c. Or you're too stupid to read a simple post. Or maybe to stupid to understand what rounding means.
It averages out - sometimes you pay a cent or two above the total price. Sometimes you pay a cent or two below the total price. If you really care about 2c you can always arrange to be paying less, you just have to add/remove items with non-multiples of 5c prices until your total ends in 1c, 2c, 6c, or 7c.
Of course no one does because, they know it evens out in the long term (heck even in the short term).
You can't seriously be that dumb, there are only 5 possible results for an individual transaction.
1. the price paid is exactly the total price
2. the store gets an extra 1c
3. the store gets an extra 2c
4. the customer gets an extra 1c
5. the customer gets an extra 2c
There is no 3 and 4 cent option, as is pretty obvious if you think for about a quarter of second instead of just making shit up.
And if you are retarded enough to care, then just always arrange to but things which total $X.02. Congratulations, you save 2c on every transaction you make. Of course the time required to make sure the transaction ends in 2, and the extra items you have to buy to do so will probably make it not worth while - but feel free to stick it to the man!
For everyone else it averages out.
I'm not sure about the legal currency precision for the dollar, but what I do know is that you have to make a distinction between prices and amounts. Prices can be defined with an arbitrary precision, and are used in calculations only. But you cannot exchange prices, only amounts. And once you go from the world of prices to the world of amounts, you have to use the currency's official precision.
. . . . . . .
may u!sh 2 sm!le at dz!z bad nn.!m!tat!ion
Please see the 1991 guideline by the Prices Surveillance Authority, The Withdrawal of Copper Coins, which said codified the "round to nearest 5" approach.
If you think the PSA (now ACCC) don't treat their guidelines as law, try not following them (to the detriment of consumers) and see how fast they manage to frame it as a breach of the Trade Practices Act. If a supermarket tried rounding up from 2c to 5c they'd be in court quicker than you could say "the Trade Practices Act 1974". Of course they could choose to always round down, since you're allowed to charge less than the marked price - but since there was a well known and advertised guideline as to what to do at the time, why would you do any different?
The big supermarkets are all part the Australian Retailers Association whose much more recent Code of Practices for Computerised Checkout Systems includes the language from the PSA guideline:
"""
With the withdrawal of copper coins it was necessary to develop Rounding Guidelines to ensure that prices
are still fair and accurate, as prices still contain denominations that are no longer in use. Under the
Rounding Guidelines the following rounding principles apply to cash transactions:
1 & 2 cents - rounded DOWN to the nearest 10
3 & 4 cents - rounded UP to the nearest 5
6 & 7 cents - rounded DOWN to the nearest 5
8 & 9 cents - rounded UP to the nearest 10
Where a consumer elects to pay by way of cheque, credit card or EFTPOS it is unnecessary for businesses
to round the total value of the transaction, as the consumer is able to pay the exact amount. Rounding on
these types of transactions may constitute a breach of the Trade Practices Act
"""
So again, why would any such store not follow their own guidelines - that all their competitors will since they all signed the thing?
In case you're wondering like me why this wasn't already against the law, I looked it up and the relevant section of US code appears to apply only to bills and banknotes. I guess this also explains why those tourist-trap penny presses are also still around.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
The smallest unit of currency in the United States is the mill, or .1 cents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._dollar
Deliver yesterday, code today, think tomorrow.