Jul 212010
http://www.connectmidmichigan.com/news/story.aspx?id=481793
Short form: There’s an increase in the use of privately minted coinage for economic transactions. Small stuff… gasoline, food, etc. In many ways a privately minted coin could well be far more “trustworthy” than actual US currency… a coin made out of actual silver has greater intrinsic value than the equivalent “value” of paper money.
8 Responses to “Signs of “The Strike””
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You put a weight and purity mark on it regarding precious metal in it, and that’s legal.
You start sticking a denomination in US currency value on it, and the FBI is going to be showing up at your door.
And that’s not a theoretical statement either; it happened fairly recently:
http://www.dig4coins.com/news/latest-news/fbi-seized-gold-and-silver-qcoinsq-from-the-office-of-liberty-dollar
Assuming it’s base metal, it’s a token, and there is no legal requirment that anyone honor its stated value outside of the business that issued it; and even there you might have a hard time proving them legally responsible to give you the stated value that’s on it.
A good comparison would be casino gambling chips; you can cash them in at the casino that issued them, but if you take them to a differnt casino, and they are under no obligation to give you anything for them at all.
They had a fascinating show on the series “Breaking Vegas” about a guy who home-manufactured metal slot machine tokens that were so high quality that there was literally no way of differentiating them from the real item (in fact, they think there are still a lot of them in circulation at the casinos where he took them).
One casino caught him and was trying to prosecute him for counterfeiting.
Didn’t work.
Since the tokens were not legal tender, there was no existing law against counterfeiting them.
So they passed a law to cover doing that.
The reason why all this occurred, was widespread fraud regarding paper currency in the the 1800’s.
A person would have a ten dollar note issued by a particular bank, and show up at that bank to cash it in, only to find it was counterfeit, or even that the bank that issued it didn’t exist.
Want to see really strange US currency? One of these showed up on “Pawn Stars” recently – take a US postage stamp, seal it in a metal coin-like housing, and have the company that sealed it in sell advertising space on the housing to whoever wanted to purchase it:
http://choyt48.home.comcast.net/~choyt48/encased_postage_run.htm
Ayn Rand fans (God pity them) will get a kick out of the name of the guy who came up with this concept.
> You put a weight and purity mark on it regarding precious metal in it, and that’s legal.
You start sticking a denomination in US currency value on it, and the FBI is going to be showing up at your door.
Based on US Code (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/486.html) that seems to be correct. Additionally, the whole idea of stampign a dollar amount on the coins doesn’t make much sense… the intrinsic value of an ounce of silver should remain relatively constant (call it, I dunno, “seven loaves of bread”) regardless of inflation… but the dollar value would be all over the place.
There’s also the fact that “Liberty Dollars” are sold at a substantial markup over the spot price of the base metal, while you can buy generic ounces for a much smaller markup.
Have you considered the glory days of Video arcade tokens ?
ten for a dollar sure seemed like a dime to me.
-Gar.
“Ayn Rand fans (God pity them) will get a kick out of the name of the guy who came up with this concept.”
You do know that Scott named this blog post after the working title of Atlas Shrugged, yes?
@Scott – nice catch
> Have you considered the glory days of Video arcade tokens ?
Not for a long time. That was an interesting era. A quarter century ago (“Back in my day…”) I couldn’t pass up a video arcade without blowing a handful of quarters. Now I couldn’t care less. Technology moved on, I guess.
> ten for a dollar sure seemed like a dime to me.
Hmmm. I don’t seem to recall any ratio better than four for a dollar, which sure seemed like a quarter to me (something I couldn’t quite understand at the time, till I realized that an unspent quarter walking out of the arcade meant one less quarter for the arcade… but an unspent token walking out meant a quarter for the arcade).
IIRC, there’s a couple of barter trade scenes as a sub-plot in ‘Too Kill A Mockingbird’ (both the book and movie versions).
“something I couldn’t quite understand at the time, till I realized that an unspent quarter walking out of the arcade meant one less quarter for the arcade… but an unspent token walking out meant a quarter for the arcade”
I learned that lesson when they started putting gift certificates on credit cards instead of writing out paper certificates as many places used to do when I was little (9/10?). To this day my reaction is essentially a cross between annoyance at the bald-faced ploy and amusement at their cleverness. After all, it works, even if the ploy is reminiscent of the movie, “The Office”
I was employed at the “Wolf’s Lair” video arcade store here in Jamestown back in the early 1980’s, and all of our game machines had a reset button set in the back on the upper right-hand corner as you faced the machine.
This was in case someone put a quarter in and nothing happened.
Back then, my nickname among the patrons of the Wolf’s Lair was “Uncle Boris”, due to my trip to the Soviet Union, and the song “Boris The Spider”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8dSBWysmnM
Outside of one complete asshole, the kids who showed up there were alright…and I’d always cut them some slack.