How about a lesson for lateral thinking? I'd still prefer to do without the coins and go for a all-virtual, all-plastic system. Efficiency and Usability.
I hadn’t really considered how much environmental waste those tickets produced. Would reusable coins be cheaper and better for the environment?
When casinos gave up coins in the slot machines I think they did themself a disservice. The noise and excitement from dropping coins and the feeling of having a bucket full of them was an important part of the experience. I wonder if patrons of Chuck E. Cheese will care. I certainly enjoyed carrying around a bucket of tickets when I was a kid. And enjoyed seeing what other people were winning. E-points sounds less fun to me...
As these virtual currencies become more practical as currencies, there will be less transactions between them and the banking system. It won't be immediately cashed out after the transaction as they are now.
I may be in a minority, but I believe the incentives of this method are "better" for the spirit of the open web, and I for one am prepared for the low revenue if it means this ideology may perdure.
The motivation is not to use *coins for their own sake, but that the alternative is getting scarier everyday.
Not to mention isn't a lot of the advantage of selling gift cards that they go unclaimed?
I'm not really sure what is the real advantage of a virtual currency system. I don't want to put any substantial amount of money in virtual currency. Also in order to buy something with a virtual currency there has to be a market for the currency, and the virtual currency is always going to be worth (substantially) less than regular cash. Maybe I'm missing something big here, but I don't see how this could ever be workable.
Why go to the effort of eliminating small coins? Why not just go ahead and switch to an electronic currency? Or at least an electronic replacement for coins and bills like they do in Japan:
It ultimately comes down to being able to go to a physical location and get coins/paper or not.
I just don't see what the value is of having my account denominated in a way that getting coins/paper is gone. Even if we went to all digital money tomorrow we would probably quickly get a bank that denominates in gold and gives you back paper slips for proof of deposit. Or doesn't even bother with gold and gives paper slips of electronic currency deposits.
We can't even get rid of useless pennies in the US.
Coin is absolutely a step in the right direction for one simple reason: it offers a convenient transition option.
Its most immediate use is to consolidate physical cards into one, but its true killer feature is the ability to instantly act as a physical proxy to a digital account (i.e. BitCoin, Paypal).
Do you own a Blu Ray player? It's more than likely to also play DVDs. If it takes a lot of time to get consumers to change over their media collections, I can only imagine how much time it takes to move the financial industry.
Meh - we get on fine with paper and plastic money in many places. Or digital. I'm glad I don't have to buy dinner with a big bag of platinum, gold, silver, copper coins etc.
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