Many years ago, some friends and I would regularly take very early morning walks around the UT campus. Those early morning walks down Cumberland Avenue convinced me that the U.S. penny was doomed. We would find dozens of them on the sidewalks and parking lots every morning, evidence that even presumably broke college students weren’t willing to bend over for a penny. Curiously, that was also the year (2006) when the cost to produce a penny first exceeded its face value.

We should have stopped making pennies that year. Since my pre-dawn impromptu scavenger hunts in 2006, the U.S. has minted 105 billion pennies, with a face value of $1.05 billion. But it cost $3.7 billion to make those pennies, resulting in a net loss of almost $2.7 billion to subsidize copper-colored litter.

The penny silliness has finally come to an end. In a victory of prudence and pragmatism over inertia and nostalgia, the U.S. Mint struck the country’s final penny on November 12. Finally, but about two decades too late.

This obviously isn’t the first time the U.S. discontinued issuance of a coin or paper currency denomination. From 1793 to 1857, the U.S. produced a half-cent coin, which was rendered effectively worthless by a decade of almost 8% annual inflation. The U.S. tried replacing the half-cent with a two-cent piece and a three-cent nickel, but neither of these new coins were ever widely adopted and were discontinued within 25 years.

The federal government didn’t even issue any paper currency until 1861. For the first 85 years of our country’s existence, the only legal paper currency in circulation came from the Continental Congress (1775-1779) and state-charted banks. The initial paper currencies were $5, $10 and $20 denominations; a year later the U.S. issued its first $1 bill, featuring a portrait of Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase.

The largest U.S. denomination ever issued, the $100,000 bill (1934-1935) was used for transactions among banks. In 1969, the U.S. stopped printing $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills, as their primary use had become to facilitate black market transactions and other criminal activities – a function now ably served by cryptocurrencies.

I suspect that governments will eventually cease issuing physical currency, replacing it with something digital. The replacement almost certainly won’t be a privately created cryptocurrency, and the reason is partly basic economics: it currently costs about $35,000 to produce a single bitcoin, or about 35% of its market value. It costs about 3.2 cents to produce a $1 bill, or 3.2% of its market value. More importantly, governments have no intention of surrendering control of the money supply and, most critically, the ability to decide who gets to use it.

David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.