Systems and associated methods for coin discrimination are disclosed herein. In one embodiment, a method for discriminating coins includes obtaining an electromagnetic sensor signal of a coin, sampling the sensor signal, generating a fingerprint of the coin from the sampled sensor signal, and calculating an appraisal using the fingerprint and a linear discriminant vector. The appraisal can be compared to a threshold to determine whether the coin is valued or impostor. In some embodiments, the linear discriminant vector can be calculated using the valued and impostor coin populations' covariance and means.