One penny. Total, not each time.
The invites are free and there is no limit on them. Ask two, ask two hundred — it is the only lever you have, and it costs nothing to pull.
Every penny goes to one person this month. You get nothing for asking anyone. That is the whole experiment. Not a charity, nothing here is tax-deductible, and nobody is paid for anything.
Day 1. One guy, one penny. The tree starts here. How this is counted →
The Copper Kingdom — it gets built here.
Every 1,000 pennies collected lays one block. Bring one, bring a thousand, or as many as you would like. Blocks appear with every 1,000 pennies, which makes the progress something you can actually see.
The wall is empty. That is the honest picture.
DROP ONE. ASK TWO.
DROP ONE. ASK TWO.
The United States stopped minting the penny. The last one was struck on November 12, 2025, and there will be no more. The hundred and fourteen billion already in circulation are still legal tender and still spend. The bill to retire the cent for good has passed the House and sits in the Senate now.
The Treasury asked Americans to spend their pennies. I'm asking you spend one here, and watch it grow.
Where the idea came from, and the whole plan →
One penny, a real one. Venmo opens with it already filled in. No account here, no card on this site, nothing to sign up for.
Sling some copper
No card, no checkout, no processor. These send straight from your phone to mine, and none of them charge a fee, so every penny you send is a penny that arrives. That is the only way this experiment is honest.
The ask is a real penny — one cent, sent from your phone, and that is the whole price of admission. If you would rather keep your cent, a symbolic drop still counts you as a participant; it just does not move the jar. Either way, giving buys you nothing at all, which is the point.
Sending 250 pennies. No fee on any of these, so every one arrives.
Places to go from here
2 for Twosdays
Everything doubles. Drop two pennies instead of one, and ask four people instead of two. It is one extra penny and two extra names, one day a week.
Your Branch
Dave has not picked his up yet. Sarah turned into fourteen. The only page on this site that is only about you.
Copper Tickets
Write a first name, get a link, hand it over yourself. We never ask for their email and we never send anything.
The Plan
Where the idea came from, the four steps, and the five ways the number is wrong. Published because a figure nobody can check is worth nothing.
The Challenge
Everybody counts followers. Nobody counts who actually moves. The board says which audiences show up.
The only money nobody bends down for.
That is the whole reason this might work. A penny has become obsolete rather than worthless. A nuisance. Nobody weighs one up, nobody remembers giving one away. Need one, take one. We leave them behind for the next person out of convenience.
The arithmetic, though, checks out. One becomes two becomes four. Thirty rounds of that is more than a billion people, and thirty-three passes everyone alive. Everyone knows that part. The question is whether people do it, and nobody has ever put a number on the answer.
That number is at the top of this page. It updates as it happens and it will be disappointing for a while, because the early days of a doubling always are. Drop yours, ask your two, then check your branch to see how many generations deep you went and how many people you are personally responsible for. You may find it funny.
It's a joke until it isn't.
Six degrees of Makin' Bacon! Let's Go!