What practical issues would there be with mostly hollow coinage?
I saw a hollowed out US half dollar in this reddit post, and thought "I wish all my coins were like that".
Doing a quick search around, most coinage seems to be quite solid. There seem to be some around, like a few of the Japanese yen coins with a hole right in the middle, but none to quite this degree.
I'm far from an expert on these things, but it would seem that making mostly-hollow coins would greatly decrease the amount of material required, as well as lightening the physical weight a lot of people's pockets.
Why aren't there more hollow coins around?
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In addition to the manufacturing problems, unless you do something like an internally-braced honeycomb structure (which REALLY increases your manufacturing costs :-)), your hollow coins will be weak and easily crushed, like a tin can.
Another problem is psychological: many people still think coins have intrinsic worth, because of the metal. Lighten the coin, and people think it's worth less.
I'm far from an expert on these things, but it would seem that making mostly-hollow coins would greatly decrease the amount of material required,
But it would radically increase the manufacturing process. Right now coins are made much the same as a wax seal, some bit of metal is struck with a die. Sure, you could strike through the metal like a cookie cutter but that would leave sharp unfinished edges, here you have added manufacturing process and not saved any metal.
The coin in that image is nowhere near as durable as it was before being cut up. There are a lot of reasons not to do that with money.
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