Republic Of Liberia $5 Coin

In 2004, Liberia was still recovering from a six-year civil war, during which time various factions had claimed to be "the" government of Liberia. Such anarchistic conditions are awful for the people actually living there but are ideal for private mints in other countries (in this case, America) wishing to strike "coins" that are "legal tender", since there's no easy way to check which faction, if any, actually authorized them as legal tender coins. A huge number of different types of "coins", legal quasi-legal and downright illegal, were issued in the name of Liberia after 1997 and a great many of these "coins" have been investigated by the cataloguers and deemed to not be official legal tender coins. This one is not yet listed in either the "Official" or "Unofficial" Krause world coin catalogues, so I guess the cataloguers haven't caught up to 2004 yet.

The base-metal ones generally are worth much less than the hyped-up price the private mint would have originally sold them for, and not even worth face value, if the face value were American dollars rather than Liberian dollars - the civil war caused the collapse of the Liberian dollar; one Liberian dollar is currently worth slightly more than 1 US cent. So any value it has is purely numismatic.

Here's one of your coins for sale on a German dealer website, for 4 euros. Judging from that price, I'd assume this is one of the base-metal types, presumably cupronickel.

Thanks all. I got it just because it looked pretty cool.