Canada is ditching the penny. Here is possibly the most Canadian sentence ever: "The budget urges Canadians to donate their pennies to charities — or even throw more into the wishing fountain." [Related]

Ooh, smoke billowing at 14th and I, NW, in D.C.! Maybe it's all the hot air being burned right now on Cabalist in the wake of that story on up-and-coming journalist-and-blogger Beltway Insiders, the one that had an all-male cast. Cabalist, should you not be a manly Beltway Insider yourself, is the email listserv Journolist replacement, where the in-the-know politicos discuss amongst themselves the weighty wonky workings of the world. (I'm jealous! I want in!) Here's a brief note to our wonky Cabalistic boyfriends in D.C.: whenever a reporter calls, you always ask with whom else he is speaking. And who his editor is. And what [...]

It is, perhaps, the logical sequel to a decade in which Americans were encouraged to use their homes as ATMs: the recent announcement that next month will see the debut of the first gold-dispensing ATMs in the United States. As any casual Glenn Beck viewer will tell you, the gold market is booming; the metal eclipsed the $1,300-an-ounce threshold recently, the highest price it's reached in history. That's nearly double the price it fetched in 2008, and nearly four times its price when the current gold craze took off in the early aughts.

And the appearance of machines dispensing shiny yellow little bars and Krugerrands is, [...]

I am one among some legion of people who trade currencies out of my "home office." Which currencies: I basically ping pong around between the Euro, the US dollar, the Canadian dollar and the British pound, looking for opportunities to buy low and sell high. These are the most liquid currencies in the world, along with the Japanese yen. But Japan's economy is weird so I don't really touch that. We'll discuss why it's weird some other time.

Beware of anyone who claims you can get rich quick doing this.

It is the beginning of the end, perhaps, the introduction of a local currency in towns like Pittsboro, North Carolina. There, you can exchange this homegrown currency for "Custom Mosaic Individual and Couples Counseling" and "Technical Tree Climbing Tutoring." Then you can only spend that currency at the local organic bread store, thus ensuring that the bailed-out U.S. banking system cannot utilize your cash, and destroying America. Actually what is wrong with this plan is that it is an aggregated barter system! And real barter systems-ask the lesbian communes of Australia!-work just fine and really we should all be doing them.

In the long summer vacation of 1971, I "worked" on a construction site in the English countryside where they were proposing to build a new hangar for the U.S. Air Force, and used the proceeds to take a holiday in Greece with my friend Charles. Originally, the idea had been to hitchhike, having crossed the channel on the boat and made our way from Calais to Paris by bus. We soon found out what I had been warned of, that the French can't abide hitchhikers. After sleeping in the Bois de Boulogne we fluked a short ride to a small town by the name of Auxerre, and there our luck [...]

"We now know from ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian records… that credit systems (what is today called virtual money) preceded the invention of coinage by thousands of years. Money was actually created by bureaucrats to track state resources and spread unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems. Barter, in turn, is largely an accidental byproduct of the use of coinage or paper money, a refuge for people operating in cash economies where currency has for some reason become inaccessible." —The actual history of money.

"An intelligent person will only make money from other intelligent people. But a true genius will make a fortune off all kinds of idiots." -Dr. Frederick C. Evering

When Dr. Evering first articulated his Theory of Genius and Idiocy (TOGAI, I guess), Steve Jobs, Rupert Murdoch and Oprah Winfrey had only just begun establishing spaces in the socio-culturescape; Reality TV was just emerging from the womb in the form of MTV's "Real World"; and the letter-word combo "P-Diddy" was nothing more than shorthand for "I have to take a piss" to those either barely out of the crib or legitimately speech-afflicted. The year was 1993, and what was on [...]

As Abe Sauer noted amid yesterday's unveiling of the new $100 bill, the crazier elements of the right were sure to complain about "how this demonstrates Obama is making good old US greenbacks all colored like that socialist euro money." Vanity Fair's Juli Weiner took things even further, suggesting the bill might as we be a Euro and appealing for the crackpot version of the Bat Signal: "Um, Drudge-siren! Is this bill a Communist-style invasion of our civil liberties?" Well, it's not exactly a siren, but Matt did indeed take note. Whether this is an indication of self-awareness or the typical knee-jerk response to anything involving the [...]

Sotheby's started its own line of diamond jewelry three and a half years ago and for the first three years it performed tremendously. Much less so now! It is a partnership between the auction house and Steinmetz Diamond Group, which is DeBeers' number one customer.

This is a fairly helpful explanation of bitcoin mining. To back up a little, and to put it in non-nerd terms, your computer "earns" (or "makes") bitcoins by, basically, doing math. Because it's an "economy," you have to do a lot more math to "earn" the same amount of money over time; new bitcoins are being "issued," with greater "value" (defined as amount of work), until the system reaches a cap, in the year 2033, when we all live in space. Our guide writes: "Since competition made the difficulty level astronomical, they’ve overwhelmingly joined 'mining pools' that hand everyone a consistent small amount of bitcoins proportional to [...]

The Greek island known variously as Holy Ghost, The Island of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, Holy Trinity, or just plain Trinity, owes its greatest renown, despite its lavish New Testamentish nomenclature, to the cameo role it played in the pagan classical age. This 12-acre slip of an atoll was a staging ground for the Persian armies laying siege to Thermopylae, the famed last stand of those hot, well-oiled Spartan souls hymned by our own latter-day Thucydides, Frank Miller. Now, however, Greek government officials are straining to find a way to convert Holy Ghost, and the nation's 6000 or so other island outcroppings into [...]

India's government has held an open call for design ideas for a symbol for its currency, the rupee-to join those internationally recognized as the dollar, the euro, the pound and the yen. The submissions have been narrowed to five, with the winner to be chosen today. True/Slant's Jeff Koyen thinks it's going to be #4, above. But I'm pulling for #2, because of its nice, broad, highly visible lines. I also think something else could work?

Oh, man, the Treasury Department's reboot of the $100 bill is tight. I don't think I've ever been this moved by currency before. I mean, sure, I'm impressed by the symbols of American freedom they've added to the face, and I think the controversial decision to change the vignette of Independence Hall to a rear, rather than front, view, actually paid off-it's bold and different, yes, but also confident and a little aggressive; it makes a statement-but it's the new security features that really have me all atingle. This is money that tells you it is coming from the future.