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
- These aren’t rare in the sense that everybody has one they keep as a collectible. If I went down to 7/11 and tried to buy something with it they’d give me a funny look.
  
  no they wouldnt. its money. i work at a gas station we get these all the time
  
  The vending machine at my job gives change in dollar coins, and the Ohio turnpike does the same. They are fairly common, just people dont like to handle change is all.
- Thank you; I didn’t know that. You do have a rather big country and I still sort of wonder if it is universally recognized. Again, just going by never having seen them in movies. Maybe United Statesians aren’t just fictional characters in movies. We’ll never know.
  
  yeah we still mostly use dollar bills but we do have dollar coins and have had dollar coins in circulation for a long while predating these versions even.
  
  United Statesians
  You can just say American.
- Lol... I've only ever seen the Sacajawea coin in the US.
  
  i have a jackson one and a polk one floating around my backpack
- The $0.50 coin is definitely not legal in the US
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_dollar_%28United_States_coin%29 ???
  
  It's not legal to murder someone with a half-dollar coin, but it's certainly legal to buy something with it.
  
  Cite your source.
  
  All the coins pictured here are $1 coins but the US absolutely has legal tender $.50 coins.

So that's where they all went. I haven't seen those in circulation since I bought stamps from a vending machine.
- Yep, there’s a pneumatic tube attached to that vending machine that goes all the way to Ecuador. Simple physics, really.
- Best way to get dollar coins is vending machines and banks

That actually makes a lot of cents.
- I don’t get it
  
  if it don't make dollars, it don't make sense

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 have these supposed $6 left over. If they turn out to be fake, I will shed a tear and move on. But thank you.
  
  I was just giving some info... I'm not saying they're fake or anything. I actually found it quite interesting to have the Ecuadorian versions of the coins.
- Ah, the $0.50 coin
  
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_dollar_(United_States_coin)

I gotta say I'm not used to seeing any dollars
- Movies, TV Shows, and Youtube videos use US dollars a lot.
  
  Local bar is still cash only. I use change for pool tables quite often or if I ever take the bus. Maybe I am just getting older but cash seems like it is still around everywhere.
- Let's pretend it's because you have gone all electric.
  
  Yeah he uses 5V 3A discharges to pay. Longer discharge, bigger payment.

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
- I like the Sacagawea and "Innovation" dollar coins. The problem with 'em, though, is people horde and collect them so they're not as available as the regular paper bills even though they are currently still in production. They come across so rarely, I also tend to think "oooh I should hold onto this!" Whenever I get one back as change.
  The only downside to using them I've run into is having to show the clerk it's a dollar and not a quarter.
  
  Humans love their shiny metal circles.
  
  The tooth fairy put one of these under my kid's pillow tonight. The thought is that he's going to enjoy it more because it's rare. It will end up in his piggy bank, out of circulation for who knows how long.
  
  Wait, can’t yall just… go to the bank? I walked into a local bank a year or so ago and asked if I could exchange for them, they asked how many and just exchanged them like anything else.
  I’m sure if I wanted thousands that would be a problem, but I’d be surprised if they didn’t have at least a handful.

We should've discontinued the dollar bill so that these coins would get used in the US, too.
- I disagree. I hate carrying any coins, while dollars of any denomination fit nicely in my wallet.
  I have a hunch that if we were to swap to these instead of paper dollars for $1, prices would go up simply because retailers would you d everything up to the nearest $5 increment.
  
  Canadian here, between electronic payments and coins being more durable than paper or polymer money, retailers don't have any incentive to charge a less competitive price.
  
  Isn't the wallet thing kinda backwards though? Like, it's not as if we all had wallets perfectly sized to carry this kind of paper money before the paper dollar was introduced.
  I figure that if coins had been the predominant form of currency for at least the past century, we'd have a great way to carry coins other than a pouch, and paper money would be inconvenient.
  
  That didn't happen in Australia when we replaced our $1 note with a $1 coin.
  But these days, it's a non issue, because as a country, we basically don't use cash at all
  
  Plebs without sacks of coins 🙄
- I lived in Ecuador for a bit and it's pretty terrible when you pay for a $5 item with a twenty dollar bill and the cashier hands you back fifteen of these coins, which has happened to me on multiple occasions.
  
  Just put those coins into your adorable coin purse.
  
  I think you mean "pretty fuckin sweet!" Coin currency master race!
- This has been studied. The US uses a higher quality paper that lasts an average of 7 years. So it is actually cheaper than minting coins. In other countries that switched to coins, singles only lasted a year or two.
  There is nothing stopping people from using coins now. People just don’t like them.
  
  They're also heavy in your pocket and don't fit in a standard cashier's drawer. There aren't enough slots.
  The real good idea would be getting rid of pennies and nickels. Those are only useful for giving stores a few extra cents in profit. They set prices at $4.99 instead of $5 so you buy more. Without pennies, they'd have to set the price at $4.90 and lose 9 cents.

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.
- They're common in vending machines, libraries, ticket machines for bus/train, etc. as change because they're easier to distribute than single dollar bills by a machine
  
  I’m starting to feel like an ass for not knowing this.
- They are normal at Renaissance faires for people who like to carry a sack of "gold".
  
  I am learning things. Thank you.
- I work with handling money on the daily. I'd rate them as uncommon but not rare. We will see a handful of them at least every other day.
- Nope, I haven't seen one since the early 2000s, when they rolled out Sacajawea dollars and then stopped a few years later because boomers were afraid they'd confuse them with quarters.
  
  They didn’t stop these still around.
  
  They were also hoping vending machine companies would use them but few did.
  
  Susan B. Anthony dollar has entered the chat

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.
- Yeah, like Cambodia. The ATMs near my hotel spat out dollars, but deep in the city it was local currency. Everyone accepted dollars but they did charge a bit higher if you were a dollar spender if you calculated the local currency conversion on that. From my country it was easier to get dollars too before I flew out, vs Riels which were harder to find and had a pretty bad exchange rate.

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.
- Well lookie who we have here… Mr Moneybags.
  
  Yeah, me and my 100 $1 coins that I collected over ten years, sitting so pretty.

WHH is maybe the funniest President's face to put on a coin
- What do you mean? He was the best president in history.

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.
- Would these be accepted in the US? Like maybe a gas station attendant would think these are fake but also maybe a bank would take them? Never going to have a chance to test that out; just curious-ish.
  
  I've accepted these back when I used to tend bar, I always appreciated the dollar coins. I also had a dude who'd only pay in $2 bills.
  
  They’re perfectly normal money that you can use without any issue.
  
  Yes, banks take them.
  
  The $1 coins yes. The $0.50 coins no.
- They will be, but businesses will often have to check their book of accepted notes. We had to do it with Scottish and Irish ones which were unfamiliar to us in Northamptonshire.

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!

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.
- Historical fact
  Edgelord horseshit
  Always a fun combination.
- Argentina is toying with the idea of doing the same thing. tl;dr - Decades of out of control inflation. Currently the worst inflation in the world. The belief is that pinning their economy to the USD would stop that
  
  Yeah Argentina is slipping back into a fascist dictatorship
- Staggering ignorance. Not like you could just Google the answer. Lol
  
  I would need to read a few books to fully understand something so complex.