You can do better than the greedy algorithm. With coins of value >! {1, 5, 23, 62, 161, 311, 878, 946} you can get *N* = >! 3285. I wrote a search program for this but it isn’t going to finish searching the entire space in reasonable time, so I don’t know whether that’s optimal. Here are the unique optimal solutions for up through six coins: >! one coin: {1}, *N* = 1 >! two coins: {1, 2}, *N* = 4 >! three coins: {1, 4, 5}, *N* = 15 >! four coins: {1, 3, 11, 18}, *N* = 44 >! five coins: {1, 4, 9, 31, 51}, *N* = 126 >! six coins: {1, 7, 11, 48, 83, 115}, *N* = 388