Hahahaha that would be just amazing...

Do you want your money? Take your money...

Hoax...

Yhea... When I received the message from a friend I thought it was true... I copied and pasted the news here in English, and then reading a little more I found it was fake... What a deception...

Would have been fun though

No further reading was needed. It said so in the first paragraph you posted.

Do they need to pay the money before appealing? 1 billion is a lot of money to change owners (even if it isn't paid in nickels ).

Nope. Payments never happen till the entire case is finished (or I think a judge orders it). Including any and all appeals.

IIRC, I read somewhere on the net about a woman paying a debt by enclosing a crude picture of a spider, with the cover letter saying something to the effect of:
"Enclosed please find an original artwork, which I valued at $800.00. I will forgo getting the balance of $300 on my $500 bill, just a simple thanks will do."

Arthur: http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html

Hahahahah MAN!!!

"Can I have my drawing of a spider back then please." hahahahaha

There have been a lot of hoaxes this week. Bill Cosby and Bill Nye died, among others.

Really? Lemme post that on my blog!

I would send it in pennies.

Wouldn't 1 billion USB in pennies cost a lot more than 1 billion USD because of the amount of copper?

They've been giving us counterfeit zinc slugs for pennies for more than 25 years now, and now they're going to degrade them even more. But they don't want you counterfeiting, oh, no!

Hah. All our coins are made of steel these days. The penny has a thin shaving of copper on each side, but the rest? steel.

Great, than you buy $1 billion in pennies, melt it down and sell the copper for more than you paid, this way you can pay them the money from the ruling and make some back at the same time!

Canada is getting rid of our pennies. They have about 6 more months and then they will be no more (Feb 2013). Yay! I believe our quarters? Will be made of steel soon (I think it was quarters, I forget).

Well pennies will just stop being minted. They will still be in circulation. But you will start to see them dwindling.

What can a penny buy? Nothing. Ben Franklin bought three big loaves of bread with three pennies...

This is what happens when the governments decide to add money to the economy by fiat, so they can buy more votes with "free" healthcare and all kinds of other crap instead of ensuring the rights of the people. The reason expensive metals were used for coinage was from the economic lessons learned in ancient times.

It is indeed a problem. But its also the fault of people thinking its a great idea to just increase the price of things for no good reason. That causes people down stream to then raise the price of their stuff, and/or ask for more compensation, which then eventually circles around. Inflation wouldn't be nearly so bad if people just didn't react so stupidly to things.

But without the extra money floating around, it'd adjust itself. Nowadays any little nudge in the economy is something for the government to fix, which they don't do worth a plugged nickel.

I still have an old 1899 Canadian penny, the thing is huge, larger than our $1 and $2 coins. I guess it must have reflected the value of copper. By 1920 electronics was booming, was probably why they reduced it to it's current size.

Money had real value back then. It's why nickles were larger than dimes. Dimes were made of silver, quarters as well. Nickles were made of... well, guess.

I think nickles these days are actually worth more than dimes in actual metal content. Money is valued based on a stupid confidence game. Unreal.

Edit: correction, The penny is not larger, just looked at it, but close. It's just a bit bigger than a quarter.

I'm sure this will sound extreme to some people, but in today's relatively stable economy, we could actually do without government intervention in the currency. It would be a much simpler and fairer system if instead of paying $20 in worthless paper or diluted currency, we paid in $20 worth of gold, silver, copper, etc. Of course, there's a whole other set of issues to be resolved in creating a modern "hard money" currency system, but imagine how much money it would save if the government wasn't pumping out fiat money! Another huge bonus: if the government doesn't control the currency, then it has far less control over you.

The people in charge don't consider that a bonus at all.

I think canadian nickels are steel too. So theres very little value in them at all. At the very least they haven't actually been made of real nickel in a while.

That was brilliant.

It used to be that paper wasn't really currency, but was a promissory note that basically said you would get the metal coins which have actual value that was owed to you. Over time paper started to replace coins but still had to have metal to back it up (gold) as it is still just a promissory note. Now a days we have worthless paper without the gold to back it up. Something has to give sooner or later.

LMFAO!!!

I find it so odd that the USA still uses such small denominations of coins. I guess it is a hold over from when holding American debt was worth something. Australia got rid of 1c and 2c coins in 1992. The value of the coins was so small, there wasn't much point keeping them.

The only excuse we were given for keeping the penny was having the GST (was 7% Goods and Services Tax). Was recently-ish reduced to 5%, and may be reduced to 0% at some point, maybe. possibly.

But yeah. Penny is going buh-bye here soon.

The reason the penny held out for so long in the U.S. was because it was cheap to manufacture. It cost 1/5th a penny to make. Getting off topic a bit, 30 trucks would not hold $1 billion dollars in nickels. I would like to see Samsung pay the judgement in discounts for thier products.

That hasn't been true in a long time (if ever).

Just basing it on the weight of the coins, you would need about 8200 dump trucks to carry the 1.05*10^11 pennies (~50% of all the pennies in circulation). Why anyone ever believed this was true is beyond me

EDIT: ah never mind, it wasn't pennies, but 5 cent coins. They would only require 3200 dump trucks.

Actually, that's getting back on topic.

Paper? Oh, it's much worse than that. Banks (not government mints) determine the value of American currency through debt. They're basically allowed to pretend they have 9 to 33 times as much money as they really do (hurray deregulation!). See http://money.howstuffworks.com/personal-finance/banking/bank1.htm

LMAO, that would be brilliant.

That's kind of how the fractional reserve system works So if we want to have a truer and simpler financial system, we'll have to ditch that too. You know, I have friends that talk about wishing we could go back to bartering for things... I'm beginning to agree, though it would make online shopping pretty difficult. Although if this great transformation did ever occur, we'd have near non-existent taxes and we'd have a deregulated market, so stuff would be as cheap in a brick and mortar store as it is online. That's the ideal anyway.