(If you bought your silver coins back in the ‘50s, though, you can now cash them out for about 13 times what you paid.) So, although many people think it’s illegal to melt down gold or silver coins, it isn’t. Whether in the form of bullion or coins, you pay for them by weight. Gold and silver are market-priced by the ounce. Thus, despite the disparity between a one-ounce gold Eagle’s face value of $50 and its market value of $1300 or so, no one is melting coins down, simply because you can’t buy an Eagle for fifty bucks. They are bought by investors or anyone who desires a store of value. Today, gold and silver coins are still minted but not for circulation. It no longer made sense after silver was removed from coinage in 1964. A prohibition on melting silver was put in place in 1967 but the ban was lifted in 1969. The right of citizens to own gold bullion wasn’t restored until 1974. government removed this possibility from the equation by making private possession of gold illegal. Otherwise, people would have a significant incentive to melt the coins down into bullion and sell for a profit. In such a coinage system, the underlying value of the metal components could not exceed the putative face value of the coin itself.
Copper slightly less so, but they needed something inexpensive for small transactions. Silver and gold were excellent choices, of course.
Since coins will be freely circulating, they must have strong wear resistance and anti-corrosive properties. The metals used to make coins were chosen for their chemical and physical properties, particularly as those apply to conditions a currency will encounter.
WHAT ARE US COINS MADE OF FREE
900 fine standard silverĪmong other interesting features of the Act were that citizens “may bring gold and silver bullion, to be coined free of expense” and, ominously, that the death penalty would be imposed for debasing the gold or silver coins, or embezzlement of the metals for those coins by officers or employees of the Mint. 920 fine standard goldĢ4.1 g pure or 27.0 g. The Coinage Act standardized production of the following coins (“disme” being the original spelling of “dime”), according to the weight of the constituent metal:ġ6.04 g pure or 17.5 g. It also established the United States Mint, which would henceforth produce and regulate the country’s coinage. The Act established the United States silver dollar as the country's standard unit of money, declared it to be lawful tender, and created a decimal system for U.S.
WHAT ARE US COINS MADE OF FULL
That continued to be the case in April 1792, when Congress passed The Coinage Act (a/k/a the Mint Act), whose full title is: An act establishing a mint, and regulating the Coins of the United States. Note that, in both cases, money is defined as coins.
Article I, Section 8 specifies that Congress “shall have the power to … coin Money, regulate the Value thereof.” And Article I, Section 10 states that “No State shall … make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.” The Constitution-which established the federal government in March of 1789-references “money” twice. The fledgling United States of America, founded in the late 18th century, was no different. Image courtesy of The Wall Street Journal The Way Things WereĮstablishing the value and means of production of currency is essential to the conduct of trade within any country, or between nations. It’s a common question: most people know there are no longer any precious metals in our coins, but what exactly are they made of, and how has their composition changed over the centuries? We’ll answer that in a moment, but first a quick look back. People often wonder about the contents of modern US coins, as well as how those coins have evolved over the past several centuries.