@grumpyfish – if it’s just pennies, pretty much all pennies, even Indian Heads from 1909 and before, weigh the same and will go through…the only ones a coin counting machine is likely to kick out would be foreign coins that look like pennies, and the vast majority of foreign coins that look like pennies are worth less than a penny (unless they happen to be a collectible vintage). And if one WAS going to just forgo the possibility of getting one penny of value in return for the few pennies that are worth more than a penny, it makes a LOT more sense to use your bank’s coin sorters, even if you have to bring them to the cashier, because Coinstar charges you a percentage.
@kibaxcheza – If you look at the odds of winning Powerball (not sure what lottery runs where you live or where @Kazz lives), you have a one in 195,249,054 chance of winning the top prize. So if you waited several weeks for the jackpot to get to $275M (might take as much as a year before it gets that high) 380 tickets, you odds of winning are 380/195,249,054 or 1in 513,813.3. Your odds of getting hit by lightning are 1 in 576,000. Basically, checking the odds at the Powerball website, it appears you would likely win one $7 prize, 3 $4 prizes and 6 $3 prizes, total $37, or less than 10% of your investment.
It would make a lot more sense to sell the coins to me, I’d run it through my own coin counter, pay the face value, then I’d sort through them all and take out the ones I wanted. In fact, if you have no interest in going through them yourself, @Kazz, I’d suggest putting up an ad on Craig’s List and seeing if any collectors wanted to buy the jar from you for more than the estimated number of pennies inside.