ROYAL AUSTRALIAN MINT FIRST COIN OF 2025

2025 was only a few hours old when it brought "lucky" 25-year-old Daniella Vido something she'd always wanted — the chance to strike the world's first coin for the new year.

The lifelong coin enthusiast's parents first began collecting coins when she was a baby, and she's now continued the tradition herself as an adult.

This year was only the second time Ms Vido had entered into the ballot, but visiting the Royal Australian Mint on New Year's Day had long been a staple of her childhood.

The Canberra local was this year among a crowd of more than 300 people who forwent the late night revelry of New Year's Eve in favour of an early morning wake up and a visit to the Royal Australian Mint.

They were all there to partake in what's become a hallowed tradition for numismatists, otherwise known as coin collectors, to try and get their hands on the first coin of the year.

Many had travelled from as far afield as Melbourne, Brisbane and regional New South Wales to be there for the occasion, and some had even backed up a visit to the Mint from the night before, where they'd tried to secure one of the last coins to be minted for the year.

This year, they commemorate 60 years of the Royal Australian Mint itself, the architecture of the building, the robots and the machines that operate out of it, the workers (affectionately known as Minties) and of course the coin collectors themselves.

Happy New Year! Here it is, the freakin' year 2025. The future. I was born in the Eisenhower administration, when there were only two satellites orbiting Earth - Sputnik and the Moon. When "2001: A Space Odyssey" debuted in 1968 we hadn't yet set foot on the Moon and the year 2001 was the far-off future. We blew past that decades ago, and over 10,000 satellites are now in orbit, enabling worldwide communications, global positioning systems, science, spying and everything in between. Computers converse with you, just like on Star Trek and HAL in "2001". And self-driving cars are operating in a number of cities (the future is already here - it's just unevenly distributed). We're still waiting for interstellar travel and flying cars, but drones are everywhere and quantum computing, quantum communications, and fusion power are closer than ever. I had to rub my eyes after reading recently that the first commercial nuclear fusion power plant is already being planned here in Virginia.

Growing up in Pittsburgh, everywhere you traveled around town, there were steel plants. Here in Ashburn, Virginia, what you see everywhere are data centers, the industry of the 21st century - vast big-box warehouses connected by fiber optic cables and filled to the brim with computers and supercomputer chips powering the internet and artificial intelligence. Somewhere among the racks of equipment are files comprising the Newman Numismatic Portal, consisting of over 6 million digitized pages of numismatic information. The future has even arrived for numismatics. And time and progress continue marching on. I hope I'm around in 2050 to see where all this leads. -Editor