Goloid $1 Experimental Pattern Coins

Very cool! Never knew about this one.

Very interesting!

The rationalization behind this alloy composition was to still give people "full metal value" for a dollar coin while at the same time reducing the physical size of the silver dollar to something a little less unwieldy. So instead of a dollar's worth of silver, your coin would have maybe half-a-dollar's worth of silver, and half-a-dollar's worth of gold, all mixed together.

Plans for such debased-gold coinage have been proposed many times in numismatic history, and almost always are abandoned, due to one simple problem: debased-gold - especially when in an alloy so debased as under 4% - is essentially indistinguishable from regular coinage silver, in terms of it's weight, physical appearance, etc. There was a perception that either (a) it would be easier and cheaper to counterfeit, and (b) there'd be a temptation for the government to drop the gold content, and nobody would ever know. There was also the issue of the gold being "less useful", in terms of the coin needing to be melted and refined to get the gold back into a useful piece of gold.

There were plans in Britain at around the same time to reduce the size of their large silver crown coin by making it bimetallic - literally bimetallic in that case, with a proposal to insert a tiny gold disc into a large silver ring, much like modern bimetallic coins such as the Canadian $2 and the European 1 and 2 euro. The main drawback here was lacking the technology to "lock together" the two pieces of the coin, so that the little gold disc didn't simply fall out.