The National Coin Shortage Is Real

[RiseLikeRa]

Wow that is a beautiful coin! I guess some of us have more than one collection/hobby.   A good friend of mine is one of the country's foremost rare coin experts. He  tried to get me hooked into the coin world but it was not my speed.


I am all in for plastic money like Canada.   Not a fan of the tap and pay because of the potential of fraud.  Old school to the  end.


Ra

[jay]

The Tap and Pay is actually more safe than a swipe.
You can buy a swipe reader on ebay and then pull all of the data from your card into Notepad, Word, Excel, etc
The data is easily copied onto another card etc.
In this case the merchant system reads the card, and submits transaction data along with the data to visa etc for approval.
Usually theft is conducted by the theif buying Gas or other unattended transactions (basically committing theft)
Or the card data is sold in bulk on the dark web.
Since Visa approved the transaction they are on the hook not the merchant.
If you have a bad waiter or scummy merchant they can use a legit transaction to scan your card and sell the data.




With a tap transaction - the merchant submits a transaction to Visa and gets back a transaction code (pending).
The pending code is then sent to the PIN pad. When you tap, the transaction is then approved or declined.
There is no opportunity for card data to be captured as none is read.
Worst case is that someone signs up as a visa merchant - you can get a small cube as a reader and tie it to your cell phone.
The merchant walks around reading everyones back pocket. Visa simply reverses the fraudlent transaction and the merchant is shut down.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

[rickhunter]

The government has made numerous proposals to get rid of the dollar bill and with the rising cost of metals, the penny (the metal content of a copper penny is actually worth more than 1 cent, the reason why they switched to zinc in 1982).  But for whatever reason, it never passes congress.  All the surveys, focus groups, and research into this matter using the US public always comes back in favor of keeping the dollar bill and the penny.  Even if it is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt with all kinds of models, that the savings incurred by doing just that is a significant one to the US government.

The only way that is going to happen, is that the law passes without regard to what public wants under the guise of "for the good of the public welfare."  It wouldn't be the first time something like that passes.  I too, would love to see a transition to polymer currency.

[rdaniel]

A while back I visited the Denver mint. I was told that the US Mint does make a profit on coins and returns the profit over to the US Treasury, to the tune of around a billion dollars or so. Unfortunately, they do lose money on the penny but make it up on other denominations.