Spare Change?
Please, someone, please. Hand me just one of these coins. Just one. It's not a lot to ask, is it? Just don't drop it on my foot.
OTTAWA (Reuters) - The Royal Canadian Mint unveiled a welcome addition to any piggy bank on Thursday — a monster gold coin with a face value of C$1 million (455,000 pounds) that it says is the world's biggest, purest and highest denomination coin.
Weighing in at 100 kilograms (220.5 pounds), the limited edition coin easily dwarfs its closest rival, the 31 kg (68 pound) "Big Phil", which was made to honour the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and has a face value of a mere 100,000 euros (C$150,000).
The Canadian mint introduced the mega-coin, which is the size of an extra-large pizza, alongside the one-ounce gold bullion coins it is mass producing at its Ottawa plant.
It won't fit in my pocket since it's 21 inches in diameter, but hey, I'm willing to bear that burden. Really. (Now, a serious question. This is 99.999 percent pure gold - a new standard of purity. Will something this size deform over time? I don't know enough about the metallurgical properties of gold to know if it will flow over time.)
Buddy, can you spare a Canadian coin?
World news | Gaius Thursday, 3 May , 2007
By skh.pcola, Thursday, 3 May , 2007 @ 7:23 pm
I wouldn’t think it would deform in the absence of forces other than gravity on it. As soft as gold is, it’s still pretty dadgum hard.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to refer to the place where a country produces legal tender currency as a “plant.” Maybe that bias is a phantom of our convention of calling such places “mints,” I dunno.
By Gaius, Thursday, 3 May , 2007 @ 7:54 pm
I don’t know, glass flows over time, you know. That’s why old glass has that distinctive ripple effect. It’s very, very slow flow, but it happens.
By skh.pcola, Saturday, 5 May , 2007 @ 12:13 am
I’ve always heard that also, but go google up “glass wavy flow” and read all of the uber-scientific stuff that totally debunks the myth. I learned something today…that glass actually does not flow at anywhere near room temp, even though I’ve heard that all of my life.