Hi Eden,

Good questions. For the most part I hate change as well. I have a coin jar where I toss everything lower than a quarter every night and, like you, I got to a coinstar once every few months and change it into $40 or so (it would of course be a lot more if I didn't sift out the quarters). Nominally I take the quarters out for laundry, but the truth is I just like quarters. I make them into little $5 stacks and will often have between $30 and $60 worth. In that regard I'm clearly a freak.

As for the dollar coins, I like them for a few reasons, despite my aversion to smaller coins. On the shallow end, I like new shiny things, especially if they're gold, but I also think dollar coins are very useful. I keep my bills in my wallet in my back pocket, and I keep change in my front pocket. Right now, I hardly ever have more than about 60 cents in change in my pocket, and I have to go into the wallet and sift out bills for most purchases. Because of my aforementioned neurosis, whenever I get bills back as change I always feel compelled (and I know I'm not entirely alone here) to sort them all in the same orientation, and by denomination, before 'filing' them back into my wallet.

What I like about dollar coins is the freedom to escape this, the ability to bypass the wallet altogether, and the chance to actually have coins that are 'worth their weight' so that the 15 coins in my pocket might have the power to buy me lunch, instead of just being temporary storage before going into the change jar or granting the power to make exact change.

As a student, most of my purchases are under $5, and it's just more convenient in a lot of circumstances. That and the previously mentioned goldness and shinyness. Ideally, I'd have liked the coins to be more like the British pound coin, smaller but thick, for ready in-the-pocket identification, but they have this silly requirement to make the size and weight of the new dollar conform to the tremendously poorly thought-out Susan B Anthony dollar.

Anyhow, I see your point, and I especially agree with your sentiments on the needs of widely accepted electronic cash. I know that the next cellphone I buy will have an infra-red port, and I'll bet it's only another 2 or 3 years before we'll be using it for interfacing with payment stations (parking meters, vending machines, portable widgets the waitperson brings to your table instead of the credit-card folio). Physical money is just another interface layer. It took the place of physical goods in trade, making things a lot easier, but I'm sure that information exchange will supplant the physical money layer. At some point it may even change the way we think of money as denominations of an arbitrary amount of buying power. Who knows?

Thanks for writing,

Kevin