I've been thinking about united states forcing its population to sell its Gold by making it illegal to own. If this was to happen now, will the government force use to sell these gold and sliver coins for there face value?
Technically, they have a face value because otherwise they wouldn't be coins, they would just be rounds/bullion. Why is the face value so low? That is another story, Ill let a more eloquent member address that one.
http://forums.silverstackers.com/to...value-please-perth-mintgive-me-an-answer.html also http://forums.silverstackers.com/forum-22-welcome-new-members.html
OK, maybe I named this thread wrong. What is to stop the government from creating a new currency and making it illegal to own the old one. Will they give you the material value or the face value for your bullion coins? It's illegal to melt down the coins. Do we own the metal content of the coins? On British notes it says I promise to pay the bearer the sum ... not the owner. I've only started stacking recently and I like the bullion coins but I not sure its wise to invest in them.
There are a couple of threads regarding gold and silver confiscation, the long and short of it is, they could technically take it if they wanted too but it is probably too much effort when they can raid your bank account or tax you higher instead.
Being a legal tender helps because the federal police have to deter counterfeiting. As for the melting part, who's to stop you, and prove your shiny new blob use to be a lunar horse?
Well it is only 99.9% pure silver, the rest is a mystery to us mere mortals but probably known to the mint. Who's to stop the mint putting in their own 0.1% of a known alloy which can be tested for when they come across a new blob which they suspect could have been a lunar? I mean really, if the Canadian mint can make 99.99% pure I am sure the Perth Mint could but maybe they are keeping that extra 0.09% for some other nefarious reason. Is the 99.9% just an insurance thing, like having the weight slightly over. If I bought a 100% silver 1oz coin and found out it was just under 100% pure and slightly under 1oz I could probably sue for each single item that wasn't up to standard. By making them slightly heavier and by not saying they are 100% they get themselves out of a lot of potential difficulties.
No, it's simply not possible to refine metal to 100% purity with current technology and techniques. Refining silver to 99.9% (999/1,000 parts) is relatively easy, getting it to 99.99% (9,999/10,000 parts) is pretty do-able and getting it to 99.999% (99,999/100,000 parts) is possible but reasonably expensive. I guess if you wanted to manually sift through the metal and manually pull out individual atoms of impurities you could do it, but you could probably find more interesting things to do with your time. Besides which, traceable impurities could easily be disguised by just melting silver from different sources together. Chuck an ASE, a Maple and an Kookaburra into the pot together and yeah, maybe the resulting blob has some metal in it that was once part of an Australian coin but who the hell knows what happened to it after it left the mint?
Thanks Big A.D. I guess it would be just as easy for Perth Mint to add a radioactive ingredient if they wanted to track their coins through various meltings. If it was an interesting enough radioactive mix you would be able to pick out the presence of a PM coin in a molten blod regardless of the other origins. Not that they are probably that worried though, but it would make identifying fakes a lot quicker.
The hypothetical amount and value of gold they can confiscate from private citizens, will be minuscule compared to the govt billions required and spent every year. As for the face value it is there to give buyers the impression of fidelity in the source and origin of the coin, aka no doubts about the purity.
in some countries bringing in legal tender isn't subject to import taxes however bringing in bullion is thus have a face value on a coin = legal tender = no tax
Yet over here if you tried to get your employer to pay you in lunar horses so you only got paid maybe $1 an hour, = less wages = less tax they won't go for it and still want to tax you for the value of the silver and not the face value.
to confuse people 1oz gold = 50 usd 1/2 oz gold = 25 usd 1/4 oz = 10 usd 1/10 oz = 5 usd 5 x 10 usd = 1oz ? when the face value is $500, then gold was 280 per oz.... people can exchange the gold for face value then go buy the gold
They can add a isotope that undergoes gamma decay. When you have a sizable amount then this could be detected this at a distance (unless your bullion is in a 1 m lead lined box). Who knows the Google car could have had a gamma detector as well as reading your wifi information. They may even be able to do this from space (the atmosphere does little to effect gamma rays). Without specialist equipment low level gamma rays are hard to detect so a private individual will find it hard to detect. I'm not say this is happening but it is feasible (governments around the world have a lot of radio active stuff they could use).
