im more wondering about banks. what happens if I want to withdraw a dollar and one cent. businesses can just adjust their pricing.

Sure, but does there need to be top down guidance? It seems fairly obvious on its face that you would just round to the nearest 5¢. Or floor/ceil any overage to the nearest 5¢. Those are really the only options, and I'm fine to leave it to businesses to handle which way they want to go on that.

It's not like the prices a business charges are set in stone by God. They can charge whatever they want. If milk is $1, and bread is $2, but they want everyone who buys milk and bread at the same time to pay $4, they can do that. It'd be a weird and unwise decision, but it's certainly allowed. So in the same way if they want to charge you $1.50 even though your "actual total" came out to $1.48, that's absolutely their prerogative, even without the penny going away.

It'll probably require some changes to PoS systems, and getting that rolled out might be the harder part, to your point. But the PoS guys have until all the pennies exit circulation to figure it out, so that'll be the better part of half a decade at minimum.

You have to remember, they're not going out and stealing all the pennies. They're just not making more. Businesses have a lot of time to prepare for this. This isn't an overnight process.

I wasn't saying I thought that was your actual position. I was saying that your actual position made as much sense as that.

There's no difference in kind between rounding to the nearest penny or rounding to the nearest nickel. It's the exact same thing, and the question is just "where do you draw the line"?

So should the line never change no matter what? Regardless of any real life implications the line is drawn exactly where it was meant to be by God at the beginning of time and it is devoid of context or reason?

If we had massive deflation to the point where tracking to the fractional cent made sense, I would argue that it might be worth printing halfpennies again. But we don't. And the idea that companies are going to be robbing you of pennies is no more or less reasonable than the idea that they are robbing you of fractional pennies.

Hell, there's a real chance it'll go the other way in a lot of cases, as stores will start marking things as $X.95 instead of $X.99. Someone else did the math based on what economists projected the cost to consumers would be, and it came out to 2¢ per person per year. Not exactly a staggering number.

The fact of the matter is that we have to occasionally re-figure at what granularity it's worth tracking our fractions of a dollar to. Inflation will always be inflating, and in a few hundred years when a loaf of bread is $250 the idea that we would track fractional dollars will seem as antiquated as the halfpenny does now.

I hear what you're saying, but I don't know that I foresee this as more than a niche issue.

Obviously this is just a gut feeling backed by no data, so it's worth the paper it's printed on. But how many pennies were banks giving to non-business customers? I have to believe that it was super negligible.

The vast majority of pennies were issued to businesses to make change. If businesses stop giving out pennies, how many pennies will the banks be asked to hand out?

Time will tell for sure, but my gut is that the amount of people hoarding pennies will be wildly offset by businesses getting rid of them.

And, in your "what if I asked for only 4¢ from the bank" example. The easy solution is that they just give you a nickel and write the penny off as a loss. The penny is just so low value that it wouldn't add up to an appreciable loss. Again, that's gut, but the average bank brick-and-mortar does on the order of hundreds or thousands of transactions per day. If they lost 4¢/transaction, that's only on the order of tens of dollars per day. They lose more to that in miscounts I would imagine.