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Why do people who try to convince others to switch to metric focus so much on the conversions?
(herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol)
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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You sure? Ok, you check your pocket and see that you have 5 half-pennies, 2 sixpence, 10 shillings, a crown, two florins, 3 half-crowns, and 3 pounds. Quickly, tell me, can you buy a 2 pound 15 shilling sandwich and a 1 pound 10 shillings drink? Which coins do you use for that?
Unless I'm missing a coin somewhere, no, you'd only have 3 pounds, 19 shillings, 2.5 pence.
Now, quickly, you have six dimes, a roll of quarters, seventeen pennies, and two rolls of nickels. Can you afford a $20 meal?
No idea because I don't know how much a dime, or a nickel is worth, nor what you define as a roll. I can guess a quarter is 25¢. None of those are a decimalized values though, and you're giving nicknames to certain coins because you're still holding to a non decimalized money system, it only makes the system more difficult to you.
A quick Google search let me know that a dime is 10¢, a roll contains 40 coins, a quarter is indeed 25¢, a penny is 1¢ and a nickel is 5¢. And first of all it becomes obvious you need to put large numbers to make the decimalized system appear difficult, I purposefully used small amounts of coins someone might have in their pockets, a total of 23 coins, with no coin having more than their next denomination in value, your example however needed over 130 coins, random nicknames for values and coins grouped in random amounts to try to introduce difficulty.
So the short answer is that if someone pulls out over 130 coins to pay for their meal they will be told to use a machine to count them. But because decimalization actually makes your life easier, a "roll of quarters" is worth 10, a "roll of nickels" is worth 2, and the rest is 77¢, so nope, even with your arbitrary exaggerated amounts and nicknames it's still easy to count it to 14.77. Had I told you five scores of Bob, 3 Baker's dozen Joeys, two threescore Florin, 17 crowns, and 3 ten bob rolls you would still be adding stuff into next week. Math is just easier with decimal currency because we use a decimal numbering system, €5/10 = 0.5€, but £5/10=10s or 120p
These aren't nicknames, these are the standard names of US currency. Pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half-dollars (not super common though)
Also if someone pulled out 26 coins to pay for a meal they'd also have a very annoyed cashier at minimum
The point of this was more "Coins are a pain in the ass regardless of whether we're dealing with 100 or 240 as the base"
They're nicknames for those (Similar to how people refer to bills by whatever president is printed on it), they might be very popular nicknames which grants them the "common name" descriptor, but the official names are the boring " cents coin". People outside of your country have no obligation to know how you nickname your coins.
Well, that might be true now because most counties only have 5 different coins, but pre-decinalized currency in the UK had 11 coins, it only got to 26 coins in my example because I included 7 of those (Sorry for farthing, pennies and Guinea fans out there), most of which in small numbers that someone might be carrying around in their pocket individually. And my point was precisely that, it's such a complex system that you end up with dozens of coins with random values trying to mix and match them to get to the amount you want.
But they're not, like you realized with 26 coins of 7 different values you didn't even get to a whole pound, with a decimal system the closest you can get is 1 50¢, 1 25¢, 1 10¢, 2 5¢, 4 1¢ which is 9 coins, and like you can see the vast majority is a single coin because 2 of them would get you to the next coin already.
Quickly: No, a roll of quarters is $10. A roll of nickels won't get you there.
Screw this, I'm going to quit counting and track down the joker who dumped all this coinage on me and box his ears with the nickel rolls.