Which option would you choose and why?

[Anonymous]

[OneViewpoint]

Both are cash. Pennies are currency and legal tender in case you don't know. At 10X the currency value I'd take the 70 million pennies. $700K is my worst case scenario. And that's what you're gonna get as modern pennies are only about 2.5% copper and 97.5% zinc. If you can demand pre 1982 pennies the copper content would be 95% copper and 5% zinc.

At 12 pennies per ounce that would be 5,833,333 ounces of metal and 5,541,666 ounces of copper. Todays spot price for copper is $0.39 per ounce. That's $2,161,250 worth of copper on the spot market. But there's a catch...

A private citizen cannot legally melt down U. S. pennies to sell the raw copper for profit. Under federal law (31 CFR Part 82), the U. S. Mint explicitly prohibits the melting, treatment, or exportation of one-cent and five-cent coins. Violating these regulations carries severe penalties, including up to $10,000 in fines, five years in prison, or both. [1, 2, 3, 4]

So is an additional $1.4 million worth 5 years in prison? Then go for it if you can find a metals trader willing to make the deal. You two can share a cell for 5 years.

[AviatorTom]

I'll take the pennies, assuming we're talking US currency.

Since the US mint stopped minting pennies in 2025, each penny is now a collector's item, worth more than one cent, and some are worth a lot of money.

70 million pennies is a huge pile of pennies, and I'd have to find place to store them securely, but they're probably worth more than $200 million (maybe more) to collectors.

[indissoluble]

I'll take $700K of 1982 pennies? The melt value on them is like 240% of their value, so 1.68 million to a metal trader.

[DeeDeeDeVour]

For $630,000 more, I'll take pennies.

I don't care if the people in the bank are gonna be pissed at me.

[Lliam]

Pennies because $700,000 is better than $70,000. It would be a pain to exchange them, but I would do the work to make it happen.

[ChicoFromThe305]

700,000 in pennies, I'd put it all through those machines that turn your change into bills and even with the fee I'd make a lot more than 70k

[lilBigPotato]

Cash includes coins. If you ask for the 70k you still might only get pennies lol.

[msc545]

Depending on whether I could find a place to handle the pennies and they were still legal tender, I would take the pennies.

[msc545]

That being said, I used to be one of the owners of a fairly large payphone company when I was in school. The phones wouldn't take pennies, but they would certainly take dimes, nickels, and quarters. Handling that change based on our 18,000 phones was an absolute nightmare. We would have people go around to the phones and collect the change in bags and then take it to the bank, where it would be run through a machine. I think we wound up, in the end, not counting the people who actually collected the change, paying the bank about 8% to count and deposit it. Still, it was a good haul of money when it worked right. It often didn't work right because the banks used to balk and not want to take the change, even though they legally have to. We had a lot of trouble with banks over this issue. We are talking about seventy million pennies here.

[Iron_Man]

Give me the pennies and let me cash them in but I want an escort

[LC75LC71]

7571 in Jcoin!

[Tomislav7]

$700,000 in pennies.

[Danny_dan92]

70k cash