I am unable to search due to being a guest, so I am sorrry if this has been asked already.
We recieved a 2005 10$ Liberty Silver Piece at work the other day , I was the only one convinced it was not Government Issued Legal tender, as it says “Trust In God” instead of the familar “In God we trust” and a 800 number/Website engraved on the back.
I went to the website and was told that it is “Legal Silverbacked Currency” and that I should spend it at accepting merchants.
I guess the real questions that i want to ask are
Is the Liberty 10$ silver coin accepted as legal tender?
Will my boss be able to take it to the bank?
Could I buy a movie ticket it with it?
And
Is it just a futile attempt to introduce a new non government controlled currency into circulation?
If you look at their site, they’re selling this Liberty money at 7% over the value of actual legal tender. In other words, you can get $100 in Liberty money for $107. That’s the most straightforward exchange they have. The others are special associate member discount things, which they don’t actually tell you how much the discount is but the initial payment is $250 and you still only get $100 in Liberty money.
Only stores that are part of their network will take this money. If you pass it off to someone outside that network who thinks it’s real money, you may not be breaking any laws (they took it of their own free will, after all) but I have to think it’s ethically shady.
What they’re basically doing (if the story being told on that page is sincere) is trying to convince the US population to go back to the silver standard. There’s more fiat-phobic crankitude on that page than you can shake a stick at…
Sure, you can make a purchase with it if the other party accepts it as a medium of exchange. Just the same way you could make a purchase with pork belly futures, shares of Google, foreign currency, belly-button lint, or gigantic circular rocks. All work if the other party will accept it. It’s also perfectly legal for that company to mint it as long as they aren’t trying to pass it off as actual US currency as minted by the US Mint.
As for actually doing anything with it, well, you might be able to sell it for its silver content. I’m not sure what the purity and weight are, but considering the NY market closed today with silver at $7.60 an oz (that’s troy oz), that better be more than an ounce of nearly pure silver to be worth face value. That’s probably the only way you’ll ever get to use it for any value. Or go to the website and find a store that will accept it.
Quite frankly, I don’t see the point. It seems to be a standard fear of fiat money. The thing that these people always miss is that gold (or silver, but gold is often where you really see this idea) really doesn’t have any more value than we say it does. Sure, the precious metals have their uses, but their value is due to scarcity and perceived worth as well. A good lesson is aluminum. Before it was easy to refine bauxite to get aluminium, the metal was incredibly scarce and amazingly expensive. Now, of course, we make it into all sorts of stuff and it’s really cheap–last market price I could find was 90 cents a pound–because aluminium is highly abundant in the earth’s crust and we know how to access it.
Those guys are nuttier than a sack of squirrels. I’ve been to their site before and my question is if greenbacks are so crummy, why do they want to trade them for their superior “money” so badly? Supposedly, they do have silver in an audited vault, but try explaining that to a store clerk after a nuclear war. “No really…it’s backed by silver. Says so right here!” If the US dollar ever became worthless, I would predict that we would be in a situation where you would want to be holding non-perishable food, water, fuel, and ammo, not “Legal Silver backed currency.”
Not to insult your co-workers, but how did the acceptance of this thing come about? How many people thought it was legit and why? I would have thought most people familiar with money would not remember seeing any with a website and an 800 number on it. Should have set off some alarm bells.
Ah- I thought we were talking about one of their banknotes. Those are backed by silver in vaults. The coin is silver, so you have the melt value. And it does look more legit than the notes. How much did your co-worker take it to be? If it was $10, you’re only out a couple bucks I guess. Still, I would think someone would think a $10 coin was odd. We’ve all heard those stories about people flipping out over a (real) $2 bill.
4 people thought it was Legit including the 2 managers, the reason being
“oh yeah, i heard they were adding color to the 5$ Bill and making a 10$ coin”
The girl who accepted it said “I dunno, the guy told me it was the new 10$ coin”
as for its weight and purity. .999 oz of pure silver says the back of the coin.
I guess I’ll just have to tell the boss to make a keyfob out of it like the website says under its “What do I do with my liberty dollar?”
Use them for something other than money. Frame them, laminate them, drill a hole in the Silver Liberty and make a keychain fob. Create a piece of jewelry or art. While this isn’t why we produce the Liberty Dollar, it is a legitimate use for a piece of currency that you own. Just don’t try that with federal currency, or you could go to jail! After all, you can’t truly own federal currency, because it’s on loan to you.
I don’t buy that it’s 100% silver. 99.99%, perhaps, or even 99.999% if they are really serious. I could see 1 oz of either of those, but still, the melt value is less than the face value–which is the opposite of old US government “secured” currency, where the melt value is higher than the face value.
Well, there’s just enough of an analytical chemist in me (though purity is just as important in many ways in organic chemistry) to be suspicious of claims of complete purity. .999 is better than I expected, that’s all.
It’s a privite script not back by the US treasure department.
Trying to pass it off as legal US tender is fraudulant. You can’t go to any store and hand it over, when they ask you to pay up. You might get sombody to accept it, but it can’t go to the bank, and nobody has to accept it, because it’s not US currency.
IIRC, the very tip of the Washinton Monument was originally supposed to have been made from aluminum, at the time a difficult metal to extract, thus rare and valuable
I think the idea is that some sort of money-based commerce would resume a few years or decades after a worldwide disaster, but it would be based on precious metals rather than government issued fiat money. Personally, I’d be one of the ones to pop a cyanide capsule rather than try to survive a postapocalyptic world.
