20 Dollar Coin Certificate?

I've seen a few commercials for this lately, much like the 911 commemorative coin that another user mentioned, and I can't help but feel kind of sad. I'm not sure which is worse - that private companies like these exist at all, or that they are willing to use a national tragedy to try and make a quick buck.

My own feelings aside, as others have mentioned, pressings like these are worth only the melting weight of the silver. The funny thing about the way they are advertised is that they say they are made with ".999 pure silver-leaf!" - which is a great way to fool people that don't know the difference between "pure silver" and "pure silver leaf" - most people, I would venture.

"Metal leaf" is an extremely thin layer of metal - foil thin, really - that is used purely for decoration. Gold leaf, for example, is generally pounded down to about 1/10000 mm (yes, one ten-thousandth of one milimeter, or 100 nanometers) in thickness. 2g of solid gold can be pounded into a one square meter (1 m^2) sheet that is 100 nm thick. Assuming (just for illustration) that silver leaf is the same thickness, that ".999 pure silver-leaf" you get on that metal bill is .0001mm thick around the outside of the bill. The rest of the "bill" is who knows what - not silver, at any rate.

For kicks, let's run a few numbers. The present bid value of an ounce of silver is $18.84 USD. So a gram of silver (1oz = 28g) is $0.67 USD. Now, assuming that silver leaf can be pounded into sheets of similar size/thickness as gold, let's take a look. The dimensions of this "bill" are 3.125" x 7.375" = 23.1 square inches per side, so a total surface area of 46.2 square inches, or 3.84 square feet.

If the surface area of these bills is roughly 3.84 square feet, then assuming the thickness noted above, we can set up the following ratio: (2g/3.2ft^2 = x / 3.84 ft^2), and find that the amount of pure silver needed to produce enough silver leaf to cover this bill is 2.4 grams. At a value of $0.67 / gram, assuming pure silver is used (.999, close enough), you're looking at approximately $1.34 of silver leaf in each of these bills - assuming you don't lose *anything* in the melting process.

Now, admittedly, I made a few large assumptions concerning the thickness of the leaf used, the amount of pure silver required to produce that much silver leaf, and so on - but you can get a general idea of just how much "silver" you're getting with one of these.

Not much.

Silver and Gold Leaf is what I use when I work on firetrucks and signs, I definitely know how thin that stuff is!

It's $20 legal tender... 20 Liberian dollars.
What is the exchange rate on that nowadays?
Maybe 12 cents?

Well, the dollar IS devaluing more and more everyday...

Nope. He went into exile in 2003.

I do not think so. He is a wanted man now, so I think "returning to power" is the farthest thing from his mind!

I am feeling lazy this morning after finishing a long meeting...

Link to Charles Taylor at Wikipedia!

There are two groups of buyers for coins. The first is serious collectors/numismatists. No offense, but they amount to just about nothing financially. Look at the circulation of coin papers and ANA membership, compared to the population. These people hold the nicest coin of a date for their set, and trade off the rest to get ones they need.

The other is the casual collector/investor/speculator. This is the main reason slobbed coins exist. Collectors aren't concerned about fake common date Morgans. These coins are slobbed to make it easy for people who couldn't care less about coins to invest in them. Common date Morgans in MS65 used to be around $500, until even the "investors" discovered there were hundreds of BAGS of them, and maybe 1000 collectors collecting MS Morgans by date.

So what do you do with 1000 collectors and 55 BAGS of 81S MS 65 Morgans? You convince non-collectors that they'll be worth a lot of money someday, and hope they'll buy 500 of them at $40 per and take $20,000 worth of this crap off the market.

The collectables market has always been very thin, which is fine, because so are quantities available. If you can make a breakthru into the non-collector market, havoc reigns.

For example, common Confederate notes used to be $3-$5. Then a promoter decided to do a big push and sell them to the generally pubic, pushing their historical value, and they needed 20,000 of them to start.

Within a month, they had wiped out the entire inventory of all major dealers, and you were lucky to find a note for less than $15!

Why? There might have been a few hundred collectors. If they could sell one note to .01 of 1% of the public, that's still 30,000 notes, prolly more than had traded hands between collectors for the last 20 years!