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A brilliant decision. Now if we could only get rid of our 1 euro cent here.

According to some inflation figures I quickly found on the internet, a (US dollar) penny had a hundred years ago 23 times as much buying power as a penny nowadays. That means the smallest denomination was then was worth almost as much as a quarter is now! People could get by without smaller coins then and they should be able to work perfectly fine now without worthless pennies.




Even better: the US used to have a half-cent but they abolished it in 1857 due to its lack of value. With inflation, it's worth more than today's dime.


For a few years during the transition to decimalisation, the UK had a half penny also.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halfpenny_(British_decimal_coin...


Some would argue that your example is almost exactly as good as the other one given.


His example features actual abolition of an existing coin, not just deciding "well, this ought to be granular enough" when designing money.


Move to the Netherlands. The one-euro-cent and two-euro-cent bits don't exist here unless you're doing a bank transaction; cash transactions get rounded to the nearest 5 cents.


This isn't all true: The US used mills (1/1000 of a dollar) up until the 1960's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_(currency)




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