Minty Fresh Trivia
Jan. 28th, 2009 01:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ornothToday a friend of mine started a contest to guess how much her bucket of coinage was worth. She gave two hints: the bucket weighed 50 pounds, and it was nearly all quarters and dimes.
A little research at the US Mint provided the following interesting surprise. Check out the last column:
| US Coin | Face Value | Weight (g) | Value/Pound |
|---|---|---|---|
| Penny | $0.01 | 2.500 | $1.81 |
| Nickel | $0.05 | 5.000 | $4.54 |
| Dime | $0.10 | 2.268 | $20.00 |
| Quarter | $0.25 | 5.670 | $20.00 |
| Fifty | $0.50 | 11.340 | $20.00 |
| Dollar | $1.00 | 8.100 | $56.00 |
Yes Virginia, when you go by weight, dimes, quarters, and half dollars all have the same value: twenty bucks a pound. So a fifty-pound tub of coins is going to add up to $1,000, no matter what the mix of quarters, dimes, and/or half dollars is. Handy, huh?
Since only terrorists, Canadians, and the US Post Office use dollar coins, that leaves just pennies and nickels which could throw your estimate off, and then only in a downward direction.
In case you’re wondering, in order for the nickel to get up to the $20/pound level, you’d have to shrink it by 75 percent, and you’d have to reduce the penny to 1/12th its current size, to one tenth the size of a dime. The dollar coin would, of course, have to be exactly twice as big as the Kennedy half.
