If you carry more than five bucks in coins out of the country, you could get fined $10,000 per incident. The U.S. government doesn’t want people melting pennies and nickels into raw material. (source: coins blog.)
What about when people make statues out of melted pennies? Although, I couldn’t find any on the web.
Change is dumb – and belongs at home in a glass container. One quarter a day is plenty.