Coinage

I went for a walk this afternoon and saw a penny lying on the ground. I am in the habit of picking up bits of metal, screws, nails and such when I am out walking, but I walked right by this penny. It is worth less than on old nail. We should do away with the penny. It is useless. It costs more to make than it is worth. While you are at it, do away with the nickel and dime as well. Well, that may be a bit extreme. But at least one of them needs to go.

The way I see it the dollar has devalued by a factor of 10 over the last 50 years or so, so we should realign our currency with it's real value. I see two ways to do it:

1) Go back to using bits. Get rid of the penny, nickel and dime, and bring in the bit. It would be worth 12.5 cents, or one half of a quarter (formerly known as two bits), or one eighth of a dollar. The advantage here is we would still use quarters, we could replace three coins with one, and people would be using dealing with bits, similar to the way they are used in a computer. Eight money bits make one dollar, eight digital bits make one byte of data.

2) Go to the decimal system. Get rid of the penny, nickel and quarter. This would have the advantage of being consistent with our decimal number system and the stock market. We would not need a new symbol for bits, though I am sure someone could come up with one. The disadvantage is that you would need a bunch of dimes, which are almost too small to handle easily. You could add a couple of new coins like 20 cent and thirty cent pieces, but I don't know how well that would go over.

Anyway, the penny has outlived it's usefulness and needs to be retired.