In his own words
When I learned the penny was never going to be struck again — no more little copper-plated Abe Lincoln in profile, no more memorial on the back, done, after 232 years — something in me objected. Not as an economist. As a kid who was raised on penny luck.
Because you know the rules. Everybody knows the rules. See a penny, pick it up, and all day long you’ll have good luck — but only heads up, we weren’t savages. A penny went in the loafer. A penny went on the railroad track and came back a smashed oval treasure. A penny sat in the take-one-leave-one tray at the gas station, the smallest welfare system ever devised, run entirely on honor, and it worked for a hundred years. Nobody remembers their first dollar. Everybody remembers a penny. It was the first money you ever owned, and it was the first thing anyone ever trusted you with.
So when they announced the end, I started watching for them. And that’s when I realized they were already going. None in my change at the store. None in my pocket at the end of the day. Nothing in the tray by the door that used to fill up without anyone putting anything in it. A hundred and fourteen billion pennies — the most minted coin in the history of the world — hadn’t gone anywhere. They were in jars and cup holders and the bottoms of bags. They had just stopped moving. And the Treasury, of all people, has been publicly asking Americans to spend them.
And I should tell you where the idea actually came from, because it was not a spreadsheet. It was a tuxedo cat named Tito, who spent his whole career batting pennies off counters and tables and scooting them around the floor until he wore himself out. He treated the least valuable object in the house as the one most worth moving. I watched him do it a thousand times before it occurred to me that he had a point: a penny sitting still is nothing. A penny in motion is luck, mischief, a whole economy of one. So if we are being honest about the credit, this idea is more his than mine.
Fine. I’m giving America’s most ignored coin one last job: making me a millionaire.
Now — who am I to ask? Nobody. And I need you to understand that being nobody is the entire point. I have no following. I have no brand. I build things on weekends, badly, and I am deliberately the least interesting part of this story. If a celebrity tried this it would prove nothing; of course a million followers can produce a million pennies. But if a nobody can — if one ordinary person asking two ordinary people, hand to hand, friend to friend, can actually reach a million — then this was never my story at all. It’s proof that the smallest possible thing, done by enough ordinary people, becomes enormous. The penny is the experiment. Everyone alive is the sample.
So here is the plan, and I will say it with a straight face. I am asking you for one penny. One. A real cent, sent from your phone, person to person, no card, no signup, no middleman taking a cut. Then I am asking you to ask two people. That is the entire machine. One becomes two becomes four, and thirty rounds of that is a billion people — more than enough to mint the first Penny Millionaire in American history out of a guy you have never heard of.
Everybody knows that math. Here is what nobody on earth knows: whether people actually do it. In all the generations that arithmetic has been passed around, no one has ever put a real number on the answer. So I built the scoreboard. Every penny, every participant, every generation deep, publishing live on the front page — whether it makes me a millionaire or makes me a punchline. I am fine with either. Both are good stories. Only one of them is history.
The penny spent 232 years being passed from stranger to stranger, luck to luck, hand to hand. It deserves one last hand-off. Drop one. Ask two.
It’s a joke until it isn’t.
— GREG, PARTICIPANT #1 · PENNYMILLIONAIRE.ORG