Small change is ridiculous. Still, we keep it around, in part as a reminder of simpler times, in part because the zinc lobby assures us that we need pennies and nickels, and in part because now and then we really do need pennies and nickels. (How else would we adjust this furniture set or make all of this?)

Most of us, though, don’t put coins to such creative use. We either lose them under car seats or toss them in a jar to be forgotten. One such jar recently got Stanford researcher Erik Steiner thinking about money and, more so, the wisdom of crowds.

So, he decided to run an experiment that includes a crowdfunded prize. Here is the backstory as he told it to me earlier this month:

In 1987, my parents inherited a piggy bank--a big glass jar--with a few coins in it. Over the last 27 years, they've tossed in their spare change, almost daily. Gradually, they built up a pretty sizable sum, or so it looked. But last week my 66-year-old mother decided it was time to cash in.

Using six 15-pound canvas bags, she brought the coins to Fulton Bank in State College Pennsylvania (the only bank she could find that wouldn’t take a cut). A bank employee emptied the bags into a giant money-counting machine that chugged and groaned, spit out a few Canadian pennies, and then came to a screeching halt. The operator opened it up, revealing a secret: the money is weighed, not counted. Blasphemy! Once it was fixed and my mom received equivalent value in paper money, she left the bank questioning whether she and my dad had gotten their money’s worth.

She had also recently been reading about the “wisdom of the crowd.” If she had asked people to guess the value of the money in the jar, would a person--or all people--be able to produce an equally accurate estimate? It apparently works with jelly beans, so why wouldn’t it work for loose change?

Because everybody loves a bean guessing contest, and because I work at a lab where we have done some crowdsourcing research, we decided to put my mom’s question to the masses. The questions are part trivial (How much did my parents pocket in the end?), part societal (Does saving small change make a difference?), and part theoretical (How wise are crowds? Do we over- or underestimate valuable things?).

If a massive crowd converges on a number, how close will it be to the machine at the Fulton Bank? We’re excited to find out.

Make your guesses by Dec. 8. After the results are in, Steiner is going to produce some kind of visualization to showcase the results. Maybe he should crowdsource that, too!