The grooves on coins have a purpose.

 

The grooves on coins have a purpose.

Most of our coins have these ridges around them called reeded edges, and they serve an essential purpose that helps prevent counterfeiting and fraud.

The way it works with fraud, such as with coins made out of silver or other precious metals, is it prevents coin clipping where one shaves off the rims and the shavings sold for profit.

This is barely detectable without the reeded edges and devalues the currency.

More than 350 million people around the world use the dollar as their main form of currency—and more than $17 trillion of economic activity is accounted for with U.S. paper money. U.S. paper money is the official currency in a number of countries and areas outside of the territorial United States. These countries include Ecuador, El Salvador, Zimbabwe, Timor-Leste, Micronesia, Palau, and The Marshall Islands. The dollar is also used in all U.S. territories, including Puerto Rico and Guam. Turks and Caicos and the British Virgin Islands, both British territories in the Caribbean, also use U.S. paper money as their currency.