Bonus! Collectible Quarters Now Even More Valuable!

Why do cents come in groups of 25, and dollars come in groups of 20?  

Please tell me this isn't one of those rhetorical questions like why we drive on parkways and park on driveways.  

Everybody loves amusing rhetorical questions!  But no...this isn't one of those.  It is rhetorical, I guess, since I'm not really expecting an explanation, but it really is a genuine question that has been plaguing me for a long long time.

Since about 7:30 this morning.  

That's a long time!  

So anyway, money is weird and confusing.  I remember back in grade school, when math class (or "maths," for our British readers) included many a lesson on currency.  They had to explain what coins were available and how to properly count out a certain number of cents using the fewest possible coins.  I never had a problem with it, since I'm a genius, but I would often have problems with self-righteous teachers telling me I got an answer wrong because I didn't put the cent sign after the correct number.  That sort of thing happens a lot when you're a genius.  It's the price we pay.  

Anyway, if you think about it, 25 is a weird number to use when dividing up a dollar.  Sure, it makes 50 really easy to come by, but is it honestly that much of a sacrifice for the sake of easy math?  If we were like the rest of the world (And by "rest of the world" I mean any country that uses Euros and the Bosnian Convertible Mark, since that's the amount of research I put into this...asking a Bosnian what money they used), dollar would be broken up into 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50 cent increments.  Dollars already come in 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50 denominations for those of you who, unlike me, don't roll exclusively with hundreds.  

The only difference in American coins is the 25 cent coin, which isn't even twenty five cents!  Look at one...nowhere on there does it say it's worth 25 cents.  It says it's a Quarter Dollar.  So now, you not only have to understand currency and values, but you have to know fractions in order to figure out 25 cents.  Granted, it's not something that most of us think about, but that's exactly the sort of thing that pops into my head and builds a nest and stays for weeks.  In fact, almost none of our coins tell you how much they're worth.  Penny is one cent, Nickel is five cents, Dime is ten cents, Quarter is 25 cents, and Fifty-Cent Piece is not surprisingly Fifty Cents.  At least only the names of the Penny, Nickel, and Dime are missing from the coin itself...they actually tell you how much they're worth.  But tell somebody not from America to give you a Dime, and they won't know which coin to hand over, since none of them have the word "Dime" on them.  This is unnecessarily confusing.

So, while there is a genuine (and entirely reasonable) push to eliminate the penny from American currency, I think those efforts are a little off the mark.  We should be replacing the quarter with a 20-cent piece.  That way, at least the denominations on either side of the decimal point will match up and you only have to learn one set of math equations to deal with money.  You'll have 1, 5, 10, 20, and 50.  Then, regardless of if you have to come up with 83 cents or 83 dollars, you can do it the same way...a 50, a 20, a 10, and three 1s.  Boom, done.  

Genius.