Death
The penny underwent a pretty quiet and underwhelming death in November 2025. At the time it cost 3.69 cents to produce a penny. The mathematicians among you may have already identified a clear inefficiency here.
For better or for worse, the country is not run by engineers but rather politicians who prefer pausing production over perfecting the penny proliferation process[1].
[1] Practically, process-perfectors prefer pausing penny production presently. Probably. ↩
What makes a good coin
A good coin does a few things well, off the top of my head:
- Is worth the space it takes up
- Is aesthetically pleasing
- Is produced efficiently
- Can be authenticated
- Has a prospering collector community
Let's review these one by one.
Worth the space it takes up
If you offer me $1 in pennies, you can keep it. Even $10 in pennies isn't worth the pain to me, maybe $100 would be worth the overhead and a trip to the bank. Contrarily, quarters, paper dollars, and gold are much better here.
Aesthetically pleasing
Pennies are controversial[2] in their appearance. I would argue that while they are unique (the only bronze colored coin in the U.S.), they aren't actually that good looking until they're tarnished.
Once again, quarters, paper dollars, and gold outperform cleanly on this front.
[2] I have never discussed this with anyone nor done a cursory online search for opinions. ↩
Produced efficiently
Discussed above, pennies cost more than a penny to produce. Meanwhile you can easily churn a profit creating quarters (fair margins), paper money (insane margins), or gold (varying).
Given that the 3.2 billion pennies produced in 2024 cost taxpayers $117 million to generate $32 million[3] in value, this inefficiency cost you on average a whopping... 53 cents? While that might not sound like a lot, the Iraq war for comparison cost the average taxpayer $1,000 over a similar - wait, what point was I trying to make again?
[3] Resisting the urge to Google this for confirmation. ↩
Authentication
The counterbalance to efficient production is authentication. Pennies sidestep this problem because there is basically no reason to fake a penny. This is probably the only good thing[4] about pennies. It's pretty tricky to produce something that looks like a quarter without the scale that the U.S. Mint has, so you're better off faking paper money. Despite including a dozen security measures, the U.S. $100 bill is the most counterfeited bill as a proportion and the $20 bill is the most counterfeited bill by sheer quantity.
While gold is probably the easiest to fake of the bunch, even the most famous counterfeit variant is named pejoratively for people who fall for its connivery.
[4] Inspiration for blog posts excluded. ↩
Collecting
Every kid had a quarter book growing up. Have you ever met anyone that cares about pennies? No. Not because they don't exist, but because penny-collectors are ashamed of themselves and refuse to come out of hiding. They know they're doing something wrong but haven't quite figured out how to get themselves out of the hole they've dug for themselves.
Shame aside, pennies never developed a thriving community because the penny collecting difficulty curve is quite steep. There are roughly three types of pennies you might consider collecting:
- Copper pennies: Between 1909 and 1981, pennies were primarily made of copper[5]. Since they cannot be legally melted down and sold as such, they sell for a reality-bending 2-3 cents at bulk rates.
- Rare pennies: Some niche pennies fetch on the order of 10 cents a piece, and some slightly more niche pennies fetch upwards of $1,000.
- Normal pennies: If you really love them for some reason or think that their value will increase now that they're not being minted (this will not happen), you might consider wasting space in your dwelling to store a myriad[6] of pennies.
In short, past the 10 cent mark, there is a Capertee Valley[7]-wide gap before the next viable collector's piece.
[5] Except the ones that weren't. ↩
[6] Precisely ten thousand. ↩
Final scores
Per my retroactively-refined stream of consciousness style of this blog, I've decided post-facto that it's critical to generate a score table.
| Category | Penny | Quarter | Paper money | Gold |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Worth the space it takes up | 1/10 | 7/10 | 10/10 | 10/10 |
| Aesthetically pleasing | 3/10[8] | 8/10 | 7/10 | 10/10 |
| Produced efficiently | -1/10[9] | 7/10 | 10/10 | 6/10 |
| Authentication | 10/10 | 8/10 | 5/10 | 4/10 |
| Collector community | 2/10 | 7/10[10] | 6/10 | 10/10 |
| Total | 15/50 | 37/50 | 38/50 | 40/50 |
Unfortunately, as we all know, gold is just a number in your Vanguard account, thus making paper money definitively the best coin.
[7] The widest canyon in the world. ↩
[8] 1/10, +2 awarded posthumously for tarnish. ↩
[9] I thought about normalizing these numbers but -300% ROI deserves no such kindness. ↩
[10] 9/10, -2 awarded in order to make the next joke work. ↩
Ode to the penny
My penny, dearest penny, where shall I spend ye?
Traded for a biscuit, a candle, or a piece of candy?
The taverns charge 'bout three for a glass of whiskey.
Wait nevermind, you're useless now; it's not 1793.
So I bid you farewell, my dear sweet friend the penny.
Were you needed? Were you wanted? Were you loved? Surely not by me.
But you always were precisely what you had claimed to be.
Time eroded ninety-eight percent of you, but the last few cents are free.