TIL Ecuador doesn't have its own currency and uses US dollars, but maybe not the same US dollars you are used to seeing.

These aren’t rare or unseen. All legal US money

So that's where they all went. I haven't seen those in circulation since I bought stamps from a vending machine.

That actually makes a lot of cents.

These are legal U.S. tender, minted in the U.S. Not common in the U.S. but still valid.

Pay attention to your other coins though. Ecuador does mint its own coins that match the American ones identically (1, 5, 10, 25 and 50 centavos) and also has some older 1 sucre coins that match these 1 dollar coins. Those would not be legal tender in the U.S., I'm pretty sure.

I gotta say I'm not used to seeing any dollars

Ecuadorians are very touchy about the condition of their paper bills. I tried to pay for a Panama hat with some cash that included a slightly torn but fully in tact $10, and the shop owner refused. As such, more durable dollar coins, which were minted by the US but never really caught on, are quite popular.

Interestingly they do mint their own coins, with Ecuadorian half dollar, quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecuadorian_centavo_coins

We should've discontinued the dollar bill so that these coins would get used in the US, too.

Similar with Montenegro, they dont have official currency but they use euro as de facto currency

I don’t live in the US. I have only ever seen the dollar bills in movies. Maybe these coins are actually normal to y’all but I found it fascinating.

There's a few countries that use US currency as the premium currency. Its very bizarre to be halfway around the world and see US dollars, but its a strong and reliable currency in countries where the local currency is too volitile to use.

I have a lot of those "gold" dollar coins. For a long time after they came out, I'd ask the cashiers at stores and banks to trade me paper dollars for whatever gold coins they had available. Many times I had to dig into my stash to get by, so it's not like I'm sitting on a massive horde of them or anything, but I have about a hundred of them.

WHH is maybe the funniest President's face to put on a coin

A bit like the Channel Islands - they use British Pounds but if you try to use them on the mainland they'll not be accepted. Other way round is fine.

Do we have a Lemmy community for Ecuador yet?

At least it's not all green

Panama is the same

Sure, when you hand the cashier some US dollar coins, nobody bats an eye, but when I hand the cashier a stack of Australian $1 notes, everybody loses their minds!

Yep, there’s a pneumatic tube attached to that vending machine that goes all the way to Ecuador. Simple physics, really.

Looks like someone got a nice vacation with all those credit card points.. lol bet they only switched because of that promotion

They used to use the Sucre. When it crashed a lot of people lost a lot of money. I wish I knew more about that, and why they decided to bend over and use the world's biggest terrorist organization's currency.