I just got back from a trip to the States and I have to say that US money is very boring by comparison to UK money. How on earth do blind/old people deal with the fact that all denominations are practically the same size, design, colour etc?

I recently moved to the US and I hate its coins. To the point that I consider all of them unusable. When I get home, I leave all the coins that I received as change on a plate by the door, hoping someday I will bring all of them at once somewhere to change for bills (I believe there are machines that do this).

My complaints:

i) They do not have numbers on them!! You have to read words to know the value

ii) To make point i) worse, they have nicknames printed on some of the coins!! They do not write "ten cents", it is "one dime". They do not write "twenty-five cents", they write "quarter dollar" (even the unit here changes)

iii) To make points i) and ii) worse, there is no default place where the value is written. $0.01 is a horizontal banner. $0.10 and $0.25 are round-based by the edge of the coin. $0.05 is round-based, but not by the edge of the coin, just slightly above another text that is by the edge.

iv) The coins do not obey a coherent progression of value and size. From smallest to largest the coins are: $0.10 < $0.01 < $0.05 < $0.25

v) The colors are all the same, except for the $0.01 coin.

So when you have a bunch of coins, you have to properly spread them in your hand to be able to compare their sizes (which is hard when the items are circles), account that there is no size-value correlation, and if you do not remember by size; you have to read a tiny sentence, lost in the middle of several other sentences, with no typographic differentiation of where they are.

> ii) To make point i) worse, they have nicknames printed on some of the coins!! They do not write "ten cents", it is "one dime". They do not write "twenty-five cents", they write "quarter dollar" (even the unit here changes)

Those aren't nicknames. They are the official names of the coins as laid down in the Coinage Act of 1792 (though "dime" was originally spelled "disme") and its successors.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_Statutes_at_Lar...

The vast majority of Americans have never read a coin to determine its value. They are all easily distinguishable by size and touch and your average American could identify them 100% of the time while blindfolded.

Unfortunately the paper money isn’t similarly touch-friendly.

The quickest way to recognize US coins is to recognize which of our four greatest presidents[1] is displayed on the coin: George Washington on the quarter (25 cents), Franklin Delano Roosevelt on the dime (10 cents), Thomas Jefferson on the nickel (5 cents), and Abraham Lincoln on the penny (1 cent). The only recent significant change to the front design is that Jefferson is looking at you on the newer nickels, rather than to the side as he did previously.

This is a completely arbitrary system, but American schoolchildren learn it very early on and memorize it, and it remains valid for the entire rest of their lives.

[1] You may recall that the faces of our four greatest presidents are also engraved on Mount Rushmore, except instead of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt is on the mountain. This is because Mount Rushmore was carved during the administration of FDR, and he had not yet had the opportunity to displace his cousin within the top four. Also, neither ranking is especially unanimous among historians or the public, but it is relatively close to the consensus.

I have this problem any time I go to another country.

Many times they don't even print them in a language I can read!

I'm kidding of course. Because usually, even if I'm only in a place for a week or two, I'll have it figured out and it's not a problem. I mean, there are only really 4 options. 1, 5, 10, and 25 cents.

And I can't remember the last time I used change to buy something.

"I mean, there are only really 4 options. 1, 5, 10, and 25 cents."

Really 5 - I got a dollar coin. Apparently they're rare although I didn't handle a lot of cash and I got one on the second or third day I was there so...not that rare then.

I used my UK contactless card. It was funny because in a lot of places they'd never seen one and kept telling me to insert or even swipe it - something I've not done for years in the UK. When the tap didn't work once it was amusing handing the card to the cashier and watching him repeatedly swipe the card and then enter the long card number, expiry date etc like it was a cardholder-not-present transaction!

The tap cards are using the same tech as apple and Google pay. So they have really started showing up everywhere all the sudden.

I haven't seen a dollar coin in years. Though maybe because I just don't pay in cash much anywhere.

Americans develop a "feel" for this, to the point where one can drop a handful of coins on the ground and know the total value just by the sound it makes.

To assist people with disabilities, you can request a little electronic reader that clips over the corner of the bill:

> the iBill Talking Bank Note Identifier, is now available free of charge from the Treasury Department to any US citizen who is blind or visually impaired.

> It can speak the dollar amount; it can produce a different pattern of tones for each denomination; or it can vibrate silently

> The United States is the only country that prints all denominations of currency in the same size. The US and Switzerland are the only two countries that use the same colors for all of their various bills.

https://www.afb.org/blindness-and-low-vision/using-technolog...

I believe the $20, $50, and $100 bill are periodically redesigned with accent colors, along with other anti-counterfeiting measures. The $10, $5, $2, and $1 are not valuable enough to be worth counterfeiting so they never redesign them.

Try Dutch money from before the Euro:

https://www.google.com/search?q=oxenaar+geld&client=ubuntu&h...:

I remember "discovering" the guilder notes back in the '70s. Brit in Germany. Our Sterling and the German DMs were so boring looking in comparison.

> are they usually that messy looking?

They don't really look much like that. See:

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/current-banknotes

I'm hoping the fact that's just the concept art means it'll be reworked to appear more like the existing notes ...

That $5 pound note looks great, I love the white sides with the emblem of the notes in general.

But the pattern remains, those bills are for the most part extremely dense and overflowing with information and layered graphics. Especially the existing $50 one which is crammed full of stuff.

It's like someone came up with a list of ideas and said yes to all of them.

It's mainly an anti-counterfeit thing to have that much info on them.

Fact is, there's even more that you can't see, there's microwriting on them too (can't find an image, but on the £5 and probably all others) and it's almost unnoticeable without magnification.

Can anyone find an image of this?

Number 9, "check the microlettering": https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/banknotes/...

A bigger but not clearer image here: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/5-pound-note

Thanks, that's excellent! I couldn't find a thing just now whereas I could find an example few years ago no problem - is it me or is google search getting totally shit?

I struggle with Google search. I've tried using it like people used to use AskJeeves and sometimes that works and others it just fails.

For this search using the words "bank notes" first in the list of search terms ruined the results.

If the design were more minimalist, they would be easier to counterfeit.

That's no excuse to make it ugly. There are plenty of ways to achieve this without massively cluttering it.

Just look at Canada, Australia, or even Mexican plastic currency. These are nowhere near as bad but are just as secure.

Canada: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/92/Canadian_Fron...

Aus: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d3/91/b8/d391b8dafd8c60277a81...

MX: https://www.inside-mexico.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Fot...

Truth! There's always a human element though... A previous employee of mine once accepted a $10 bill that turned out to be a $1 bill with a zero drawn in black marker on each corner of the bill by the ones. The store was insanely busy that day so I can kind of understand how she let it slip past her, but good grief.

You're kind of demonstrating why the £ design is superior to the $ though

They're all very different colours, for a start, so you can know what you're holding quickly/intuitively (so long as you're not colour-blind).

Do you not realise that the point of the complexity is to counter forgery?

You're not critiquing a web page design!

Interesting, I like the withdrawn notes page

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/withdrawn-banknote...

I agree, of all the different kinds of UK notes the latest Royal Bank of Scotland notes are my favourite designs [0] [1]. Make sure to look at both sides. One of the confusing things about bank notes in the UK is that there are 5 totally different designs for each denomination: Bank of England, Bank of Scotland, Royal Bank of Scotland, Clydesdale Bank and Ulster Bank. This can lead to some confusion when you try to pay someone with a rarer note as they may not have seen them before. Scottish notes are usually OK. Good luck with Ulster Bank notes though. [0]https://www.scotbanks.org.uk/banknotes/royal-bank-of-scotlan... [1]https://www.scotbanks.org.uk/banknotes/royal-bank-of-scotlan...

There's also the Isle of Mann Bank.

AFAIK the Manx pound is not Sterling, although it is in parity with Sterling.

Manx pounds are not legal currency in the UK but UK pounds (whether the notes are English, Scottish, or NI) are legal in the Isle of Man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_pound

Thank you, that explains why no one would take my Manx Pound on England when I tried.

Anti counterfeiting measures, perchance?

I'm not familiar with British bank notes, but from a quick Google query, they do look pretty ugly. However, I would assume that the image in the article looks more like the cover of a Powerpoint presentation than the actual note design itself.