A Sixteenth of a Dollar

Once upon a time there was a coin called "the mil". This was a "milli-dollar" coin, one thousandth of a dollar (one tenth of a cent). Inflation made it obsolete, and about the only vestige of it remaining in US society is in the signs on gas stations, where the price for gas almost always is listed as something-dollars, something-cents, and 9/10 of a cent, per gallon.

In 1964 the US Mint stopped making quarters and dimes out of silver. Inflation had made silver too expensive for it to be used that way. Nowadays they are "sandwich" coins having copper cores, with a silvery cladding (maybe nickel?).

In 1982 the US Mint stopped making pennies out of mostly copper. Inflation had finally made copper too expensive for it to be used that way. Nowadays pennies are zinc, with a copper cladding.

Recently inflation has made even these pennies too expensive to keep making. Either a cheaper metal will have to be used, or they will have to be abandoned altogether, like the mil. I understand that nickels are starting to be too expensive to keep making, also. And considering how much copper still goes into making dimes and quarters, it seems to me that a significant coinage shift is about to become Needed.

SO:

The Quarter-Dollar will likely have to get a new composition. Possibly it will get its copper core replaced with zinc (that seems to me to be the simplest thing to do, using and combining existing Minting technologies).

Next, since a quarter-dollar is still too large a unit for various small items that you might buy, we still need something smaller than a quarter, but larger than the likely-soon-to-be-abandoned penny.

Note that if we are likely to abandon the nickel soon, also, then we have a dilemma in that you can't "make change" of a quarter into dimes only. This is why I'm suggesting we eliminate all three coins, pennies, nickels, and dimes, and replace them with just one new coin, as follows:

One sixteenth of a dollar is 6.25 cents. If there was a coin having this value, then exactly four of them would equal a quarter-dollar, just like four quarter-dollars equals a whole dollar. Making change from a quarter would be easy.

Since 6.25 cents is so close to the 5 cents of a nickel, we can immediately see that this coin will have to be made of some inexpensive metal, perhaps entirely from zinc, or maybe even aluminum. (Aluminum has been used for coinage for decades in various other countries.) Maybe even galvanized (zinc coated) iron could be used!

Two problems remain. First, if the coin has a value of 6.25 cents, then when we write down some amount of dollars and cents, we no longer can do this with precision using only two decimal places: One Dollar and One One-Sixteenth Dollar is $1.0625 --very cumbersome! We would need a simpler way to write it. I will suggest that we introduce the semi-colon (;) symbol into the numerical description, like so:

First, using quarters only:
$1.25 = $1;10
$1.50 = $1;20
$1.75 = $1;30
Note that when you have 4 quarters you don't need to write $1;40 because you can instead write $2.00

We extend the above for the Sixteenth-dollar coin:
$1.0625 = $1;01
$1.1250 = $1;02
$1.1875 = $1;03
$1.2500 = $1;04 = $1;10

Basically, and for small amounts of change, on the right of the semicolon we simply write down the QUANTITY of quarters and sixteenths. So if I have 1 dollar and 2 quarters and 3 sixteenths, I simply write $1;23 --it's a little more difficult if I have 10 sixteenths, and want to write it down; I have to mentally compute that 8 of those coins equals 2 quarters, so I would end up writing $0;22 because there are 2 sixteenths left over, after doing the conversion.

The hardest problem of all I have saved for last. "One Sixteenth of a Dollar" is a pretty long NAME. Even "sixteenth" is harder to pronounce than words like "quarter" or "nickel" or "penny". We need a simpler name for this proposed coin.

Any suggestions?