Coins
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A coin is usually a piece of hard material, generally metal, usually in the shape of a disc, and most often issued by a government, to be used as a form of money in transactions. Along with banknotes, coins make up the cash forms of all modern money systems. Coins made for circulation (general monetized use) are usually used for lower-valued units, and banknotes are usually used for the higher values; also, in most money systems, the highest value coin is worth less than the lowest-value note. Invariably also, the face value of circulation coins is less than the gross value of the metal used in making them.
Exceptions to these rules occur for non-monetized "bullion coins" made of silver or gold (and, rarely, other metals), intended for collectors or investors in precious metals. For examples of modern gold collector/investor coins, the United States mints the American Gold Eagle, Canada mints the Canadian Gold Maple Leaf, and South Africa mints the Krugerrand. The U.S. Eagle coin has a "face value" of ten U.S. dollars, and the Double Eagle has a "face value" of twenty U.S. dollars, but these are historical references to pre-depression times when this was the case; they no longer apply, since the market value of the coin, and the gold in it, has been many times that amount since the coin was re-issued as a modern collector and investor's item, in 1986. The Canadian Gold Maple Leaf also has nominal face value, but the Krugerrand does not.
Historically, a great number of coinage metals (including alloys) and other materials have been used practically, impractically (i.e., rarely), artistically, and experimentally in the production of coins for both circulation, collection, and metal investment (where bullion coins often serve as more convenient stores of assured metal quantity and purity than other bullion). See also Coin debasement
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Collecting coins
See Coin collecting, Coin values and Numismatics for more information on the collecting of coins, bank notes, token coins and Exonumia.
Features of modern coinage
The milled, or reeded, edges still found on many coins (always those that were once made of gold or silver, even if not so now) were originally designed to show that none of the valuable metal had been shaved off the coin. Prior to the use of milled edges, circulating coins commonly suffered from "shaving", by which unscrupulous persons would shave a small amount of precious metal from the edge. Unmilled British sterling silver coins were known to be shaved to almost half of their minted weight. This form of debasement in Tudor England led to the formulation of Gresham's Law. The monarch would have to periodically recall circulating coins, paying only bullion value of the silver, and re-mint them.
Traditionally, the side of a coin carrying a bust of a monarch or other authority, or a national emblem, is called the obverse, or colloquially, heads. The other side is called the reverse, or colloquially, tails. However, the rule is violated in some cases. [1] Another rule is that the side carrying the year of minting is the obverse, although some coins, most Canadian coins, the British 20p coin, and all Japanese coins, are an exception.
The orientation of the obverse with respect to the reverse differs between countries. Some coins have coin orientation, where the coin must be flipped vertically to see the other side; other coins, such as British coins, have medallic orientation, where the coin must be flipped horizontally to see the other side.
Coins that are not round (British 50 pence for example) usually have an odd number of sides, with the edges rounded off. This is so that the coin has a constant diameter, and will therefore be recognised by vending machines whichever way it is inserted. If a coin had an even number of sides this would not be possible. Some such older designs remain, however, such as the 12-sided Australian 50 cent coin.
Coins are popularly used as a sort of two-sided die; in order to choose between two options with a random possibility, one choice will be labeled "heads" and the other "tails," and a coin will be flipped or "tossed" to see whether the heads or tails side comes up on top. See Bernoulli trial; a fair coin is defined to have the probability of heads (in the parlance of Bernoulli trials, a "success") of exactly 0.5. A widely publicized example of an asymmetrical coin is the Belgian one euro coin [2]. See also coin flipping.
Coins are sometimes falsified to make one side weigh more. Such a coin is said to be "weighted."
Some coins, called bracteates, are so thin they can only be struck on one side.
Bi-metallic coins are sometimes used for higher values and for commemorative purposes. In the 1990s, France used a tri-metallic coin. Common circulating examples include the €1, €2, British £2 and Canadian $2.
Guitar-shaped coins were once issued in Somalia, Poland once issued a fan-shaped 10 zloty coin, but perhaps the oddest coin ever was the 2002 $10 coin from Nauru, a Europe-shaped coin.[3]
The Royal Canadian Mint is now able to produce holographic-effect gold and silver coinage.
For a list of many pure metallic elements and their alloys which have used in actual circulation coins and for trial experiments, see coinage metals. [4]
See also
- Bracteate
- Numismatics
- Banknote
- Bullion coin
- Coin collecting
- Coinage Metals
- Counterfeit
- Currency
- Euro coins
- Roman currency
- Greek coinage
- Category:Currency images
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