Bit (too many) Coins

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by alatar

Seems like every time I turn around, the TV's showing Dwarves and a Hobbit running from a dragon in a landscape littered with glittery coins. There are so many coins in DoS that Smaug can hide, undetected, beneath them. As the movie continues, we see multiple halls and rooms of Tolkien's fantasy filled with the same tokens.

The number and disposition of these coins is staggering, and each time I see the piles, I can't help but think about:

• Why aren't the coins stacked, or ordered in some way? It wasn't Smaug that created this disorder. If Thrór really needed to see a pile that big, couldn't it have been achieved with fewer coins piled atop empty barrels? Besides, as mentioned previously, allowing the King under the Mountain achieve the same title while role-playing Scrooge McDuck, why wouldn't he want them counted and collected so Thrór could know when some went missing?
  
• What purpose (besides showing that Thorin's grandfather was truly sick - and probably had a Ring - and that Peter Jackson is involved) would hoarding that many coins serve? Did the Dwarves use them as backing for credit? Other than making for some great indoor shield-sliding, can't see the purpose (especially with even more gold present in a dwarven statue).
  
• What could be done with that many coins anyway? As they obviously weren't in circulation, what effect did they have on the local economy? There appears to be so many coins, that, like when a government prints paper money without any backing, the value of each coin is diminished (like so many scenes in a trilogy that needn't have been).

Those aren't a billion gold coins, they are a billion little skulls painted gold, borrowed from the equally ridiculous skeletal avalanche scene in the Paths of the Dead during the RotK film.