They’re not worth anything, never were but even less through the years with inflation.
If a store wants to sell something for 99 cent, they can either just take 1€ or 95 cent.
Maybe even 5 cent pieces? But that would be a bit radical.
I am a bit annoyed that easy ideas like this are never discussed in politics, or wherever. It would make our lives just a little bit easier, and having them achieves NOTHING.
Isn’t that only because so much effort is being made to improve paper bills - like transparent windows, holograms, UV print, microprint, raised print, embedded metal strips, etc. etc.?
Nothing is preventing anyone from implementing better protections into coins - integrating polymers, transparent rings, multiple metal rings, even integrating chips… it’s just currently not worth the effort.
Well, yes. You could change the form of our bills from very flat cuboids into less flat cylinders. You could even incorporate metals into it if you so desired.
At that point the resulting coin would be just as fake as the bill though.
Your complaint is that paper bills are too fake?
Nah, I don’t mind paper bills at all. I was only questioning the point of replacing our bills with coins if you make the coins to be basically round bills.
Yeah, but I wasn’t suggesting that we should replace bills with coins.
I’m just pointing out that bills are not inherently safer than coins, and that coins are not inherently less safe than bills. It just depends on how much effort you want to invest in either to make them harder to counterfeit.